Scottish bookseller and publisher, founder of the publishing firm of William Blackwood and Sons, Ltd.

After learning antiquarian bookselling, Blackwood set up a business in Edinburgh in 1804. By 1810 he was acting in Scotland for several London publishers and publishing on his own account. In 1816 he brought out Walter Scott's Tales of My Landlord. In 1817 he founded the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, later called Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and from 1905 called Blackwood's Magazine. Established as a Tory counterweight to the Whiggish Edinburgh Review, it quickly gained notoriety with its satire on the Edinburgh Whigs and attacks on the Cockney school of poets, as it chose to designate Leigh Hunt and his circle; it also gained circulation by publishing stories, poems, and serialized novels. Later the magazine became less controversial and exercised a wide and steady literary influence. Scott, James Hogg, and Thomas De Quincey were among its early contributors.

Blackwood was succeeded by his sons Alexander (1806–45), Robert (1808–52), and John (1818–79). They added a London office to the business in 1840 and an Edinburgh printing office in 1847. After them the conduct of the firm passed, in turn, to William Blackwood (1836–1912), George Blackwood (1876–1942), James Blackwood (1878–1951), and George Douglas Blackwood (b. 1909), great-great-grandson of the founder. After the mid-19th century, the magazine published serially and then in book form works by George Eliot, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Lever, Anthony Trollope, and Joseph Conrad.