Happy 82nd birthday, New Yorker! (The magazine debuted on Feb. 17, 1925, with the Feb. 21 issue.) I asked Martin Schneider, Emdashes Squib Report bureau chief, to do a little sleuthing into a corner of Bruce McCall cartoon on pp. 168-69 of this week’s anniversary issue.

As Emdashes’s resident archival expert, I found McCall’s cartoon of the first-ever guided tour of The New Yorker’s offices highly irresistible. My favorite invention is the “Wheel of Article Ideas,” which pokes fun at the identifiably New Yorker blend of subjects—often fascinating, often arcane, sometimes too trendy, sometimes too dusty, but never, ever straightforwardly or unselfconsciously au courant. (After all, any magazine can be merely up to date; only a special magazine asks what in going on in J.Lo.’s brain.)

Does there lurk in this inscrutable amalgam a hidden code, each item pointing to a different era or major leitmotif of The New Yorker? Were I better versed in New Yorker lore, would it be within my grasp to crack that code and watch the different shards of the enigma interlock into a grander pattern? (The other possibility is that it’s just a cartoon.)

Anyway, let’s get to it. Did McCall include any topics that The New Yorker has already handled? Armed with the bottomless Complete New Yorker, I decided to find out.

LOGS
In the 2/13/1984 issue, The New Yorker ran a poem by Karl Shapiro called “The Sawdust Logs.” Quoth Shapiro, “Why shouldn’t sawdust have its day?”

NAPS
In the 5/31/1941 issue is a cute little TOTT about two young women who are prepared for their suburban journey out of Grand Central. They produce an alarm clock and nap right up to one minute before their train arrives in Scarsdale. Then they scamper off the train.

OXEN
In the 8/24/1946 issue, Berton Roueche reports on a day in the company of Percy Peck Beardsley, breeder of Devon oxen, who plies his weary trade in the bleak and pitiless plains of…Connecticut. In my opinion, this is a dig at the Shawn era, what with its E.J. Kahn “Staff of Life” treatises on wheat and the like.

BALLET DESIGN
Joan Acocella’s 5/28/2001 review of a Jerome Robbins bio cites “Balanchine’s grand, unfolding design.” Arlene Croce’s 11/17/1997 showcase on Merrill Ashley refers to “the design of classical dancing.” I suppose any ballet production has set and costume designers, and the corps may have designs on the prima ballerina’s primo position, but I take “design” here to mean something closer to an engineering term. Essentially an absurd juxtaposition.

J.LO I.Q.
Astoundingly, The New Yorker has never devoted any significant space to the question of Ms. Lopez’s intellectual gifts. In the 10/2/2000 issue, however, Christopher Buckley did float the idea of someday replacing future VP Dick Cheney with J.Lo. So back off, hatas! If “Oxen” is the kind of profile Shawn would have run, here we surely hark back to the Tina Brown era.

MAMBO
This seems to be a dig at the uneasy fit that such a steamy, sultry subject would be in the pages of The New Yorker, and McCall certainly has a point: The New Yorker has never produced much copy on the subject. There’s a TOTT from 4/18/1988 about an uptick in dance-course enrollments in the wake of Dirty Dancing. There was also that 2000 Oscar Hijuelos book The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which got some coverage too.

IRAN’S BILLBOARD CRISIS
No such thing. I take this somewhat absurd reference to be essentially a compliment. The implication is that The New Yorker has a knack for producing fresh coverage—perhaps at times perversely—even on hot spots that have already received plenty of exposure. Who can forget that 2002 look at trampoline fetishism in Karbala?

FERNANDO PÓO
What a marvelously supple reference. Fernando Póo, Fernando Pó, and Fernão do Pó refer to both a person and a place. He was a Portuguese explorer who in 1472 discovered an island off the west coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea that for centuries was named after him. In 1979 it assumed the name Bioko after some sort of revolution. His name was also applied to certain places in Cameroon, which he also explored, this fact leading to the only mention I could find in The New Yorker—a 2/18/1961 TOTT about “Cameroun.” Other Fernandos mentioned in The New Yorker include Meirelles, Luis Mattos da Matta, Scianna, Medina, Collor, Henrique, Ferrer, Ochoa, Valenzuela, and Nottebohm. The Fernandos created by ABBA and Billy Crystal have apparently escaped The New Yorker’s notice.

JAM
Oh, could we get any more quaint and cozy? Why not just choose the tea cosy, for that matter? As it happens, jam figures prominently in the searing 9/10/1966 TOTT on the National Fancy Food and Confection Show. So there.

MILLARD FILLMORE
Ah, our most risible president. Does anyone even know whether he was any good or not? His amusingness seems a priori. Alas, the world awaits the definitive New Yorker treatment of the subject. In the meantime, Morton Hunt’s 11/3/1956 account of the presidential race of 1856 will have to do.

Can anybody read that last one? “Zoo”? I await further clarification (shout? murmur?) from Mr. McCall.