A Small Publication, Kept by One Man and a Great Deal of Help.

The Editor

Reginald Jeaves entered service in 1972 as a hall-boy in a large and by then rather tired country house on the North Shore. He retired, forty-one years later, as head of household at a smaller and considerably happier one. In the decade since, he has written — slowly, and without much noise — about the work that occupied him, and about the quieter, more portable version of it that most of us do in our own homes without calling it anything at all.

Ask Jeaves began in 2011 as a set of typewritten letters to a handful of former colleagues. A niece, impatient with his resistance to email, put the letters on the internet. The readership has grown, gently, by the method most things of value grow by: one person telling another.

The Quarterly

Four issues are posted each year, at the turn of each season. Each runs to roughly twenty pages. The regular columns — Jeaves Replies, The Larder, Of Houses, and The Rule Book — anchor each issue, and are joined by a single longer essay and, now and then, a guest contribution from a craftsperson the editor admires.

The quarterly is not sold. It is not for sale. It is posted, in modest quantities, to readers who have asked to receive it through someone who already does. It is, as one reader has put it, "the opposite of a newsletter" — which is not a slight on newsletters, only an honest description.

Editorial Philosophy

• We write as though the reader has had a long week.
• We prefer the particular to the general, and the small to the large.
• We do not believe hospitality is a performance, and we try not to make it sound like one.
• We answer letters slowly, but we do answer them.