Amiga User International
Croftward's Amiga monthly, and a third publisher in EC1R
An independent Amiga magazine published by Croftward Limited from Clerkenwell — the same postcode district as EMAP — and running at least from 1987 to 1996. The last British title in this library to get an entry.
Amiga User International was published by Croftward Limited from the Finsbury Business Centre, 40 Bowling Green Lane, London EC1R — and distributed by Comag.
Seventeen issues are held here, running March 1988 to April 1996. The earliest of them is volume 2, number 3, which means the magazine started before this library can see it.
⚠ founded: 1987 is therefore an inference from that volume number rather than a date read off an issue. This is the thinnest holding of any British title in this Vault — seventeen issues across an eight-year span — and the entry is correspondingly cautious.
Clerkenwell again
Bowling Green Lane is a few minutes’ walk from Priory Court, Farringdon Lane, where EMAP produced Sinclair User, CU Amiga and the rest, and from Herbal Hill, the address C&VG gave in 1981. Three publishers, one postcode district.
That is not a conspiracy, it is print. EC1R is Clerkenwell, historically London’s printing and publishing quarter, and magazines were made near the people who typeset and printed them.
What it was up against
Amiga User International was independent, like Amiga Action out of Chichester, in a market otherwise divided between Future, EMAP and Europress. Of the seven British Amiga magazines this Vault now covers, five belonged to one of those three houses and two did not.
See also
- Commodore Amiga
- Amiga Action — the other independent
- CU Amiga, Amiga Format, Amiga Computing, Amiga Power, Amiga Shopper — the rest of the market
- EMAP — the neighbour