I opened my Maryland Gazette at home today and was reminded of something I had forgotten entirely: The 2011-2012 Capital-Gazette Guidebook.

The Guidebook was inserted into the Maryland Gazette today, and it also was in The Sunday Capital a few days ago. (The day after Hurricane Irene.)

This year, one of my photos was selected for the cover of the Guidebook, which is completely  awesome.

I had gone to the Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse earlier this year to take pictures for a story about lighthouse tours. I was instructed to get extra photos of the lighthouse itself, in cases we needed them in the future. I guess this year’s Guidebook fit that bill.

I hope newspaper readers will take some time to flip through the Guidebook. It’s a mammoth undertaking and we have to update every single bit of information — and report and write new information — alongside all of the day-to-day work we have publishing The Capital, the Maryland Gazette, the Crofton-West County Gazette and Capital Style.

Over the course of the summer in the newsroom, you hear many phone calls that go like this: “Hi, I’m calling from The Capital. Just checking the details of your fall festival …”

Or: ” … Just checking on the hours of the food bank.”

Or: ” … Just checking when the museum is open.”

There also are a ton of ads in the Guidebook, many of them from businesses that won Readers Choice awards from The Capital or the Maryland Gazette. Other ads are grouped geographically, with special sections for businesses in Severna Park or south county, for example. I’m sure the advertising staff works just as hard as the newsroom staff does on their part of the Guidebook.

In some respects, the Guidebook is not much fun at all to put together — it’s a lot of tedious work — but we hope it serves our readers well.