As one meanders through the pages of the nation’s weekly and monthly magazines, several factors soon become apparent. Some of these factors are all too obvious; others can be somewhat subtle. What follows are a few of these fun factors I’ve observed through the years of both reading and just plain paging through a multitude of magazines.

The first one is what I call the fall out factor. Not long ago I started to read a magazine checked out from the Albert Lea Public Library. I happened to drop this magazine and three of those &uot;postage will be paid by addressee&uot; cards fell out. Somehow this magazine had gone through the U.S. Mail and had been looked at by several library patrons. Those cards had survived intact until my minor mishap. Oh well, those cards can serve as alleged bookmarks.

The next one, the tear out factor, is based on those advertising cards which stick out between magazine pages. They are intended to either sell magazine subscriptions or serve as leads for salesmen. That’s right, use one of these postage-free cards to obtain a booklet or other information and expect to deal with a persistent salesman at the door sometime in the future.

One of my favorites is based on the page numbering factor in all too many magazines. For some obscure reason these publications don’t care to number all their pages. A prime example can be found in the Nov. 18, 2002, issue of Time Magazine. I defy anyone to find a page number from 69 to 105 in that issue. Those unnumbered pages, incidentally, are mostly devoted to advertising blurbs.

Then there’s the related factor based on the supplements worked into the pages of the magazines. For example, the Nov. 18, 2002, issue of Newsweek Magazine stops page numbering on 50. What follows are 14 pages of

advertising section based on winter sports with several informercial articles. Then Newsweek’s actual contents resume again on page 51.

A magazine named Vanity Fair presents a monthly challenge with what I call the content factor. The October 2002 issue has a total of 378 pages and weighs about 24 ounces. Yet, one has to endure 327 pages of advertising and oddball features on mostly unnumbered pages before the first article listed on the cover is even encountered.

One of the really overlooked factors in magazines is based on jumping. Here at the newspaper, a jump is having a news article start on page one and continue and conclude on another page in that particular issue.

Some magazines, especially the weekly news publications, like Newsweek and Time, keep their articles and reports in concise units. Other magazines will start an article on page 15 and continue, or jump, it to page 58, for instance. In this case, the readers have three choices. They can immediately turn to the jump page, keep reading until the jump page comes up, or ignore the jump if the rest of the article isn’t worth reading.

Then there’s the pharmacy phactor (please note the cute spelling used). This phactor is based on those full two-page magazine advertisements for prescription medicines. One page is for a blurb about the alleged cure-all product. The second page of alleged information can be considered as a legal disclaimer about this particular medical product.

We’ll skip over the sniff factor used to provide a sample of scents for perfumes and colognes in the women’s magazines and close off with the skip-over factor.

There are certain parts of some magazines I’m more than willing to skip-over to save time. My favorite at the present time is the &uot;Style Watch&uot; portion of People Magazine. A very close second in this category are good portions of any issue of Entertainment Weekly Magazine.

Tribune feature writer Ed Shannon’s column appears Fridays in the Tribune.