Ann Ward was a publisher based in York in the eighteenth century. She was the wife of the printer Caesar Ward, the owner of the York Courant newspaper, and took over her husband’s firm after his death in 1759. Ward continued to print the newspaper and managed a book shop in the centre of York until her death in 1789. During her career, she printed over 100 titles, one of the most notable being the first edition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, published in 1760.
Ward also had a steady income from printing guidebooks to York. This second edition to her guide to York Minster, based on information found in Francis Drake’s Eboracum (1737), was printed in 1783.