While searching through ebay earlier on in the week I stumbled across a job lot of VHS which was for sale, the starting bid was 99p. After some careful consideration I set my price limit and left it in the hands of the VHS Gods. Luckily I won the lot for a little below my top offer, and seeing as though the seller was very close to me for collection, I don’t think I did too bad. The guy then emailed the next day and we agreed a collection date and time. On the same email it stated that he had a further 2-3,000 tapes in the garage that I could look through and select a few titles, and for free.
I was warned beforehand though that the garage contained nothing more than re-issues and certainly nothing of any interest for me. The trouble is, as any collector will tell you, it only takes that one tape…

He also had quite a few US cartons in there too but he said he wanted to keep them back so I looked no further. I couldn’t punish myself. I’d lalso ike to point out that the guy in question is a former collector of VHS and these tapes in his garage are the remains of a few old bulk deals on ebay. Chance purchases, if you will, in the hope that he could find some gems among them.

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After a few dry spells hunting around the carboots and charity shops of late, I didn’t hold out much hope for this bank holiday weekend. And it appeared to be heading for yet another dry patch when the first carboot we stumbled across had about 9 cars and a burger van, I don’t think I need to tell you that we didn’t stay long.
The next boot was much better, I had only found about 4 or 5 decent tapes but the signs were good. Then came rows upon rows of nothingness, not a single tape in sight, that was until we reached the final row. I could see a pile of tapes on the floor but it wasn’t until I got closer that I realised I had struck pre-certed gold. Or at the very least, silver.

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First of all, let me point out that this was not pre-planned. The tapes just have a way of finding me, it’s like we’re connected.

A few months ago my wife and I had purchased a UK quad poster of Scream for my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary. The moment I presented it to my Dad the bug had bitten him and he is now a collector, not to mention a rival, of UK quads. I now look back with regret and wish we’d have bought them a set of steak knives instead.
Since hanging Scream on the wall, he has gone on to purchase the quads of The Monster Squad and Rules of Attraction, two of my favourite movies of all time. You can tell i’m a little bitter about the whole thing. “It was me who showed you the way!”, and various other nonsense I like to shout at him from time to time. Anyway, my Dad needed them framed so I told him where I get all my work done, a local place who if receiving regular business will knock you up a few quad frames for a real bargain. He ordered them a few weeks ago and today we had to go and collect them from town. I took along my framed Mean Machine poster which I needed taking out and replacing with my recently acquired Vanilla Sky quad, I was very excited about having that on wall.

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I search the internet on a daily basis for all sorts of VHS tapes, be them pre-cert or otherwise. The only trouble with purchasing tapes online is the postage costs that are involved. A single tape will cost you somewhere in the region of £2.99 in stamps alone these days. So i’ve decided to only use the net for the tapes on my ‘Most Wanted’ list only and try to collect all others from job lots that come my way.

The latest job lot offer was from a guy who had over 1,000 titles from an old video store that had closed down a while back. I could tell from some of the pictures he had sent me, that the tapes were mostly late 80’s to mid 90’s stuff, an era of film that I have a keen fondness for.

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Since the success of last weeks discovery, I have been going through my collection and ripping out any of the mainstream titles. The sort of titles that you can pick up in any charity shop for around 5-10p each. Boxing them up and placing them into safe storage. While performing this thankless task it had me wondering if I had managed to somehow miss a few obscurities from the shop. After all, I only had time to briefly scan over the many thousands of tapes in attendance, and it was getting late.

So armed with the knowledge of ‘if it looks awful it’s probably awesome’, I made plans to go back. But this time I was taking my Brother-in-law and 80’s guru Simon along with me for extra eye help. On the drive up I gave him a lesson in health and safety VHS hunting. I couldn’t allow him to go through the various pitfalls and tape traps that I had to pass through last week. By the way my cut from last week is steadily turning into a scar, I just hope it’s V shaped. That would make one hell of a story.

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