In an annual ritual, I clean my desk and get a column out of what I find. In this case, that meant finally dealing with a small bag of crumpled, dirty newspaper pages from 1935 that a reader had “helpfully” donated and which had been put on my desk. Read all about it in Wednesday’s column.

As an addendum, a few items were written or half-written but didn’t make the cut for the column, and most of the notes, etc., were simply tossed because nothing of interest came to mind to say about them. And I didn’t get my desk cleared before the column was due either. So there’s still a slight mess. But things look much better, and there’s a psychological and organizational boost from that. Onward to 2018!