He split with Hooper in 1908-1909 in a nasty legal fight after failing to wrest control of the Britannica from Hooper, Jackson was born in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts, and he began to work cleaning the bookshop and offices of Estes and Lauriat in Boston, ten miles from his birthplace.
Jackson founded the Grolier Society, which specialized in making extra-fine editions of classics and rare literature.
After the split with Hooper he acquired the rights to publish the British The Children's Encyclopaedia under the name Book of Knowledge.
Being an assembly of the journal issues, the encyclopedia was not organized alphabetically, but rather topically; navigation was assisted by an index in the final volume.
Jackson secured the American reprint rights in 1910 after resolving some copyright issues with Lord Northcliffe, Grolier, Inc. subsequently became a large publisher of general encyclopaedias, including Academic American Encyclopedia, and the software Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia.