Information about William Ticknor

William Davis Ticknor (August 6 1810-April 10 1864) was an American publisher in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, and a founder of the publishing house Ticknor and Fields.

Ticknor was born to lawyer and antiquarian William and Betsey (Ellis) Ticknor, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1829, Timothy Harrington Carter converted Boston's Old Corner Book Store to house seven presses, and started printing and selling books. Ticknor and partner James Fields subsequently moved in, and by 1832 they had accumulated an impressive list of writers. Their shop in the Old Corner Bookstore became a meeting place for the most influential American writers of the nineteenth century.

In the 1840's, Ticknor and Fields established the royalty system, which for the first time bound authors to publishers and rewarded them both a signing fee and a ten percent portion of sales. Soon Ticknor and Fields published the finest and most popular writers of the era: Horatio Alger, Lydia Maria Child, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and John Greenleaf Whittier.

In March 1850 Ticknor and Fields published Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, and in May of that year the Hawthornes moved to Tanglewood Cottage in the little town of Lenox, Massachusetts upon Ticknor's advice.

In 1867 the business was moved from the Old Corner Bookstore to 124 Tremont Street in Boston. The firm also acquired magazines for its publishing list including the Atlantic Monthly, Our Young Folks, and the North American Review.

Over time, Ticknor and Fields formed a close relationship with Riverside Press, a Boston printing company owned by Henry Oscar Houghton. When Ticknor died, James Osgood took over the company, and in the late 1870s the firm merged with Houghton's to eventually form Houghton, Mifflin and Company in 1880, thus combining the literary works of writers with the expertise of a publisher.

Ticknor died in Philadelphia in 1864.