“Everybody else is doing it” is an excuse seldom accepted by elementary-school teachers or parents of six-year-olds. In the publishing business, however, it is not merely an excuse, but rather has the force of a commandment. Thus, as everyone else is doing on this last day of the year, we pause to take a short look backward at the year that is passing.

In January, we remembered the famous Peace Conference at Pleasant Springs, in which Chief Green Hat rejected the proposal of the United States government to remove his tribe westward. We also heard another installment of the exciting Captain Pleonasm radio serial—an episode in which Captain Pleonasm meets Pipefinger.

In February, the passing of James Windbreaker Klunk, the noted futurologist, brought forth an interesting obituary. We also presented Dr. Boli’s Infallible Weather Indicator as a gift for the amateur meteorologists among our readers.

In March we had a collection of slogans for fortune cookies, a form of literature very popular among some readers. For the education of the young, we presented Science Experiments You Can Do at Home. Many of those young readers, though perhaps not all, survived into April.

In April, we explained how the Internet works. We also explained why the days get longer in the spring. We were on a bit of a bender.

Dire Predictions made us a bit nervous in May, but we were prepared to protect ourselves by watching alertly for suspicious activity.

In June, we debunked a spurious Hawthorne quotation, which was hard work, but now that the work is done the last bit of false information has been eliminated from the Internet. We then turned our attention to the matter of world peace, which we secured through confusingly similar flags.

We learned how to be a cat in July, We also ran an exclusive report on the White House’s controversial regulation of Orthodox theology.

In August, we sorted out the causes of the Civil War. Our Brief Glossary of Common Terms in Academic Literary Criticism was praised by a number of readers who were not academic literary critics.

In September, Dr. Boli acquired First Things magazine, which he is frankly still trying to figure out what to do with. We also learned how to tell the temperature from a cricket’s chirping,

In October, we met some remarkable cats. We ended the month with A Frightening Story for Halloween Night.

In November, we learned the proper etiquette for televisions in public places. November was also the month in which The Crimes of Galahad was published, an event that marks the maturity of the American novel as an art form.

In December we were given an exclusive extract from Irving Vanderbolck-Wheedle’s romance Hypericum, which may remind certain readers of Longfellow, or may not. Finally, December was the month in which we looked back at the rest of the year 2012, and no one is happier than Dr. Boli to have that out of the way.