Publisher and writer. Born in Retford, Nottinghamshire, he was the son of the bookseller James Taylor (1752–1823) and his wife Sarah (b. 1760). Educated at Lincoln and Retford grammar schools, he moved to London in 1803, where he worked in the publishing and bookselling trade. In 1806 he set up his own business with James Augustus Hessey (1785–1870). The firm’s staple fare was sermons, moral tracts and homilies. They also published contemporary poets, including John Clare (1793–1864: DNB) and John Keats (1795–1821; DNB), though Taylor’s extensive and frequently unauthorised copyediting was a subject of controversy then and since. From 1821–1825 he was co-owner of the London Magazine, whose contributors included Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. His business partnership with Hessey ended in 1825, and in 1827 Taylor became bookseller and publisher to the new University of London. He retired from business in 1853. Taylor was himself a prolific writer, publishing on religious, scientific, antiquarian, economic, geographical and philological subjects, amongst others. Taylor and Southey corresponded in 1823 over Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations (1824), which Taylor was publishing and Southey was helping to censor to remove its more libellous material.