About

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 at Ashgrove, 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 — Linden Hall, by the estuary — where he remains, in a cottage on the grounds, at the kindness of the family he once worked for.

In the decade since retirement, he has written — slowly, and without much noise — about the work that occupied him: the inventories, the menus, the mending of linens and of tempers; 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 without asking. (The editor has since forgiven her. Mostly.) 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 — Candlemas, May-Day, Lammas, and Michaelmas. Each runs to roughly twenty pages, octavo, stitched by hand in a shed the editor shares with a bad-tempered cat named Hobbes.

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: a basket-maker in the next village, a bookbinder in town, a chandler whose beeswax tapers we have used for eight Christmases running.

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.
We will not recommend a thing we have not used for a year.

A Word on Method

The essays are written in longhand, at a kitchen table, and typed afterwards on a portable Olivetti the editor acquired in 1981 and has twice been talked out of replacing. The fair copy is then — with some reluctance — transferred to a laptop belonging to the aforementioned niece, who handles what she calls the internet portion of the operation. Any typographical eccentricity you find here is, in the end, a collaboration between three generations and a typewriter ribbon that is probably due for changing.

On Correspondence

The editor's postbag is, at present, full to its hinges. Letters pass through the hands of existing readers — Mrs. Denholm does Tuesday's sorting; the niece, when she visits, does Thursday's — and what comes through comes through. The biscuit tin (see below) is lined with the ones that took longest to answer.

On the Region

The quarterly is edited from a small cottage on the North Shore, in a village whose name we keep to ourselves for reasons the editor considers obvious and his niece considers dramatic.

On the Name

The editor's surname is pronounced Jeevs, to rhyme with eaves. The spelling is his grandfather's, who was particular about it. ^*

^* Yes, we know. No, it is not a reference. The grandfather predates the novelist.

A Note from the Niece

"He will not tell you this himself, but he answers every letter, and he keeps the ones he likes in a biscuit tin under the telephone table. It is, at last count, three biscuit tins."