BONUS NUMBER 101: CENTERFOLDS

( Did You Sleep With the Models?)

I might have titled this post “Centerfold Problems,” for that’s what I want to explain. Those problems often occur in transferring a centerfold from Mandate, Honcho, or Playguy to the computer screen. The two media are often incompatible and uncooperative — for me at least.

Today’s art feature, “Lens or Brush,” features the work of Jim Leff. In the April 1983 issue of Mandate, it occupied four pages: two centerfolds on pages 50, 51, 52, 53. When I laid down the magazine on my scanner, however, pages 50 and 51 proved recalcitrant. More to the point, the recalcitrance began when I transferred the scan to a Microsoft Word template designed for me by my IT professional, Ron Pyatt.

At that stage it is usually necessary to crop a few millimeters from the right-hand side of the first page and an equal amount from the left hand side of the second. Exhibit 2 below is an example of the easy part: in the magazine, and on my screen, those two centerfold pages are independent of each other.

But look at Exhibit 3. I cropped as usual but the two pages refused to blend. They came maddeningly close, but no matter how minutely I cropped and adjusted, the image remained jarring.

“Dammit, I won’t be defeated!” I said to Francesca the cat, who was looking on with supervisory interest. The result: Exhibit 1, which almost creates the illusion of two magazine pages separated by a gutter (i.e., the space where two pages meet at the binding).

PS: The jet flying across the tropical sky that I refer to in the Jim Leff article is a tiny speck in the upper left-hand corner of “Bush Pilot on the Beach.”

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Too much information? Jump to Exhibit 4, a two-page centerfold from Playguy (January 1985), which is self-explanatory and which caused no headache in the transfer.

Exhibit 1

Exhibit 2

Exhibit 3

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Exhibit 4

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