The idea behind the title — and related magazines Papercraft Inspirations and Simply Knitting — follows what Ingram describes as “a post-9/11 mood that saw, in America, a greater interest in domestic activities”. This may sound daft, but Ingram is careful to be more prosaic: “Our view of that is: well, that’s fine, but the point is that these are hobbies that are now of growing interest here.”

While IPC Media, Emap and their high-profile glossy rivals concentrate on starting mass-market weekly titles, partly to please the supermarkets, Future has managed to grow in its own way. It publishes 116 titles, all monthlies, aimed at the hobbyist, a strategy that Ingram says is “narrow but deep”. The titles have modest circulations; the lowest-selling is bought by just 6,000, but most are profitable on sales of between 10,000 and 20,000.

“We don’t aspire to compete in mainstream areas,” Ingram says, although he insists that Future would not be averse to launching a niche weekly if the opportunity came along.

The small titles and small budgets — the company reckons its most expensive launch would cost a bit over a million — mean it can launch on the basis of a gut feeling. “Most of our launches are based on ideas that have been promoted by champions in editorial,” says Ingram. This year 13 launches are planned.

By contrast, Emap is spending ten times as much to bring Closer, its real-life/celebrity weekly, to France. With that kind of investment, major publishers can take as much as a year in market research before deciding to go ahead. Certainly, IPC took that kind of time before approving the launch of Pick Me Up, a housewives’ weekly, in January.

Future tries to offset the risk with a strategy of quick closures: 12 titles were shut down last year, although the company says that its success rate is about 75 per cent. Scrapbook Inspirations is on its second issue, priced at £3.35, and appears to have found a market, with more than 10,000 readers.

The chief executive reckons that there are “good closures and bad closures”, meaning that some titles fail while others simply reach the end of their natural life. Even getting that right is a skill, says Ingram, who prides himself on the five years of profit that the company squeezed out of a Sinclair Spectrum games title, picked up from rival Dennis Publishing, that others would have shut more quickly.

Future was founded 20 years ago on the back of a title for users of Amstrad computers, and the core of the business is still related. A crucial contract with Microsoft to be the official international publisher of titles for the XBox games console means that games magazines account for 44 per cent of turnover. Computer magazines represent another 28 per cent. Future’s bestseller is the US Official XBox Magazine, which has a circulation of 400,000.

In Britain, Future is the fifth-largest consumer magazine publisher, with modest operations in the US, France and Italy also. Profits before exceptionals were £12.7 million on sales of £104.3 million in the first half to March. But Ingram, who has run the business since its 1999 flotation (it was once owned by Pearson) wants to be number three in the UK, behind IPC and Emap, by 2008.

He hopes to get there partly through organic growth — currently running at a useful but hardly racy 5 per cent — but mainly through acquisitions of more “special interest” titles. Since 2003 Future has made 11 acquisitions, including the purchase of 38 titles for £30.5 million from the struggling Highbury House, approved by Highbury shareholders yesterday.

Ingram will continue to target other small publishers — there are, apparently, 120 small consumer publishers in the UK — although the chief executive would also like to try to persuade the bigger groups to offload their more obscure brands on to him. “That’s what we did with Hachette in France. They had three games titles with 75 staff,” he says wistfully. If Ingram can keep appealing to nerds while rivals chase the latest fashion, there will be more growth for him yet.

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