'The Inquirer has been continuously publishing since 9 July 1842.' Photo: Cover of The Inquirer.
8,000th issue for The Inquirer
The longest-lived non-conformist paper.
The Inquirer, the Unitarian fortnightly magazine that started a year before the Friend, is getting ready to publish its 8,000th issue in November.
Colleen Burns, editor of the magazine for fifteen years, told the Friend: ‘I am proud that The Inquirer, the longest-lived non-conformist paper, will celebrate its 8,000th issue. The Inquirer has been continuously publishing since 9 July 1842. Its role connecting Unitarians and other religious liberals has become even more important through recent months while congregations have been unable to gather in person. It’s not easy to keep a print publication going in this day and age.’
The magazine launched on 9 July in 1842, nearly four years after a Quaker title was published, also called The Inquirer. This other Inquirer was published on 1 January in 1838 by a ‘group of Quakers bent on defending the literal truth of the Bible… but had evidently failed by 1842’.
According to the magazine’s website, The Inquirer was founded as a Unitarian Christian newspaper by Edward Hill, described as ‘a rather shadowy figure who was probably not himself a Unitarian and who hoped for commercial success’. While the majority of its twenty editors have been Unitarians, mostly ministers, the magazine had a Quaker editor, Gavin Walker, from 2003 to 2005. The magazine was published weekly for many years before eventually going fortnightly. Most copies are distributed in bulk via congregations.
John Midgley, on the board of directors for the magazine, told the Friend that to mark the occasion, ‘I looked through the archives of the magazine and, in my regular column, I compared how things were for the 7.000th edition to how they are now.’
The Inquirer will print its 8,000th edition on 28 November.
