Car Boot sales in England are a magical thing. There are days where you can walk around them and find nothing, but there are those special occasions when you strike gold. While there I occasionally speak with a few of the sellers, and upon hearing about my obsession with VHS, you’d be surprised by the amount of people who tell me they took their entire collection to the nearest landfill, believing them to be worthless. I’ve had to stop asking about certain titles they used to own, knowing their rarity and how limited they were in release. I get abdominal pains just thinking about their destruction.

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Last summer was the year of the finds for me. There’s just something about the sun that makes people want to part with their treasures. It seemed like everywhere I went people would flock to me with tapes. Then the summer passed and the tapes dried up. I was once again reduced to purchasing tapes online, with only a few turning up in charity stores and car boot sales.

At the start of this year, I had promised myself that I would slow down with my collecting, something that I had stuck to until the end of March, when an opportunity presented itself that I wasn’t about to pass up on.

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This year was supposed to be the year of the cut back, the intervention required to pause my tape collecting habits. The big trim down! Sadly, as always, this was not to be…

Last year I purchased a tape called Gallery of Horror from a store in town, it was on the ultra rare UK Trytel label, a label that only a few tapes have ever surfaced on. I purchased it based on the cover art alone but little did I know that this was one-of-a-kind. A picture of the tape was uploaded to a private collectors forum and it went a little crazy after that, with offers flooding into my inbox.
I eventually, after seeking advice from other collectors, listed the tape on ebay (something I don’t like to make a habit of) and it fetched a cool £580. The sale allowed me to go back to the store and purchase a lot more tapes from the same guy, thus justifying my actions.

Anyway, over the last few weekends I have been back to the store to sort through hundreds of new titles. I’m very fortunate in the sense that this particular seller has all of his tapes in a storage facility, and only allows myself to rummage through them whenever I please, even leaving me a key to lock up once finished.

His storage habits leave a lot to be desired but rest assured, there be gold in them there compressed stacks.

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