The Centre Page Pull-Out

AP58 to AP60

As anyone knew who had a hand in in their attempts to raise the dead, review games on a basis of strict supportable evidence and destroy continents with a special ray, AMIGA POWER was a haven for scientific empiricism. Always thinking ahead except in the sense of anticipating the tasks necessary to complete the jobs they were paid for in order to finish the mag on time, AP's mighty beings cast about themselves at all moments for new discoveries they could one day knit into the mag as educationally uplifting features or jokes nobody anywhere could understand except the writer several months previously.

As part of this quest for interest, our heroic idlers found that, by mildly shaking the horrible stapled pamphlet that jaunty AP tribute mag Sega Zone had become like the worrying jaws of the Hound of the Baskervilles of Justice, they could make the middle four to eight pages drop straight out from the weight of the inexpensive paper. This experiment was written up on an index card and filed away for retrieval in the space world of tomorrow.

Come February 1996's AP58 and the dawn of the Stapled Age. Referring to AP's subterranean silo of records by vacuum tube, the Anarchic Collective realised the structural weakness of spineless mags could be turned to an excusing advantage by pretending the two centre pages were a separate four-side removable supplement. With the exacting enthusiasm AP reserved for the truly pointless, the three Centre Page Pull-Outs were therefore carefully designed to look like inserted leaflets, and - inspiration! - the flatplan was jiggered so (if the pull-out were pulled out, or fell out under its own weight) the "new" centre pages would form a double-page review instead of two giveaway single items. (Excellently, this also meant that if you left the pull-out alone, you had to flick past when reading the review from one column to the next.) Meanwhile, everything else was late as usual.

Readers of AP58 who did not loose the stapled issue from disobeying fingers and flee from the shop into traffic found Dead Magazine, a publicity sampler for AP's sinister mega-global paymasters' new niche mag aimed at dead people. The convincing likeliness of the enterprise was bolstered by thinly veiled complaints in AP proper about being forced to carry bumph for the new mag, including the traditional surly-AP-members-in-grudging- contractually-obliged-trailer ad in the news pages. In reality, this centre page pull-out was AMIGA POWER's fourth most elaborate attack on calculated reader squeezing in the magazine's history (AP58 was not only stapled, but shorter and more expensive), written by J Nash as a farewell piece as he became exceptionally cross about something or other and left.

A month passed in discrete units, and then AMIGA POWER To The People - The AP Guide To Revolution And Insurrection appeared in AP59. This convenient edition of overthrow and organised mayhem revealed AP's ten favourite revolutions (revolutionarily, not in order of bodycount) and detailed a simple 12-step programme to establishing your own revolutionary council in a country of your choice (cleverly described as "10 steps" on the pull-out cover to defeat counterrevolutionary forces). There was also a non-alcoholic Molotov Cocktail recipe and everyone holding up guns, grenades, flags, sickles and sledgehammers in poses of supportive revolt.

AP60's centre page pull-out was Canoe Squad.

At this point, furtherly diminishing quantities of AP flip-leafs and an edict about strictly Amiga-related features left no room for pull-out supplements, and the centre pages were released to the mag itself like nursed horses dashing away across two or three meadows and a picnic.