Notes & Queries

Launched in November 1849, as a weekly miscellany, Notes & Queries (N&Q) was the brainchild of William J. Thomas. He had previously organized a column in the Athenaeum as a medium for the exchange of information between folklorists, antiquarians, literary researchers, and the like, and N&Q was an extension of the same idea. N&Q became an indispensable part of the scholar's library, and folklorists in particular are grateful for the mass of information its pages contain; as evidenced by the number of citations included in this Dictionary. Thoms edited N&Q himself until 1872, and he compiled a selection of the folklore material contained in the first twelve volumes, which was published as Choice Notes (1859). He also described the circumstances of its foundation in a series of articles in: 5s:6 (1876), 1-2, 41-2, 101-2, 221-2; 5s:7 (1877), 1-2, 222-3, 303-5. The publication still continues, but the amount of folklore included in its pages decreased sharply around the First World War.