Glacial Errata, No. 43

Notes and Queries

An inexhaustibly fun resource if you want to go down an antiquated rabbit hole is the British publication Notes and Queries, founded in 1849. N&Q is a magazine (originally weekly, now quarterly) originally subtitled “A Medium of Inter-Communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, Etc.” that’s perhaps best described as a sort of proto-Reddit: each issue would list various questions that individuals had written in about, or perhaps answers to someone’s previous question from an earlier issue, or just some random bit of knowledge or trivia.

The motto (“When found, make a note of”), attributed to Captain Cuttle, comes from Dickens’s Dombey and Sons.

The Etymology of the Word “Abracadabra”

Each issue contains a few longer notes, followed by some “minor notes,” and then various questions posed by readers looking for help on some research project or to answer some nagging issue.

Remarkably, N&Q is still in print (now published by Oxford University Press). But it’s the early stuff that I find the most compelling and strange, a scattershot compendium of a different time and an entirely different set of sensibilities.

Lines on a Skull

The replies are nicely indexed to the original queries, so a regular reader can trace some of these conversations back through their histories, and occasionally one catches a glimpse of the modern Redditor’s “This question has been asked and answered on this sub a million times before, use the search feature*, buddy.”

* = the incredibly detailed general indices 

The Glamis Mystery

Unlike Reddit, though, these conversations were of necessity stretched out over various issues, often with an answer to a query showing up years after it was posed, such that any given issue is a sort of random cacophony of information and requests. Honestly, it’s often more fun to not bother to track down the source, and instead just stumble across these random replies out of context.

Peculiar Attributes of the Seventh Son

To be honest, if there’s one drawback to N&Q, it’s that it’s very…well…British. And reading through the volumes I’ll often get bored by questions of genealogy or other weird shit that only British people seem to care about. (There’s a lot of questions about identifying various aristocratic individuals in various portraits, decoding heraldic symbols, and so forth.) But it’s so voluminous that it’s easy enough to skip ahead and land on something more interesting.

It’s also an incredibly rich document for folklore, superstition, and other minor ephemera—which is precisely the kind of thing you want more than anything if you’re someone like me.

You can peruse the various volumes here at this link.