I’m very proud to announce that Amiga Shopper is finally available for download. After more than a year of measuring, cutting, bleeding, swearing, scanning, processing, compressing and checking, all 71 issues – plus the “preview” issue and a couple of extra bits’n’pieces – is now ready for the world. To my knowledge, this is the first complete collection of Amiga Shopper’s available for download.

This all started when – after one too many bottles of Scruttock’s Old Dirigible – I bid on a pristine collection of Amiga Shopper’s on eBay. They were going for buttons, and although the postage cost soon tripled the price it was worth it when they were delivered: beautifully-preserved, tight, almost untouched copies of Shopper in original binders. There was only one thing to do – cut them all up into little bits with a very sharp knife.

Amiga Shopper, for most of it’s life, was printed on a heavy newsprint in a larger-than-A4 format. Newsprint is great as it “sticks” to the document feeder on my scanner really well – no more skipped pages (in theory at least). However, my scanner is only A4 in size, so I’ve had to trim off a small chunk of each mags on the left and right hand sides.

This means, unfortunately, there’s a little bit of Amiga goodness missing from each page. In 99% of cases, this doesn’t matter – all that’s been lost is a page number (which any half-decent PDF reader will show you), or maybe a small slice of an advert. Most “editorial” stuff had a fairly wide margin at the left and right, so nothing of real value has been lost. Very occasionally, I’ve managed to cut out the first few letters of a left or right hand paragraph on a page – sorry about this; think of it as an opportunity to improve your Scrabble skills by guessing what the start or end of the words were.