Selected VHS Covers
Selected VHS Covers
By Paul Ford, Co-founder, Postlight
VHS boxes never made it into the “unique art form” category in the same way that vinyl record album sleeves did. Album sleeves were a foot square on a side—room to play for a graphic designer. People would linger over the art while they listened to the music. In contrast, VHS covers were all hustle—get people to pick up the tape, get them to buy or rent it, and get them out of the store. Different media, different histories, different expectations.
Yet there’s a lot of—well, “cultural history” might be a generous term, but it’s not wrong—embedded in those VHS cases. Not long ago there appeared on the Internet Archive the Retro-Daze collection of VHS tape covers. As a dedicated ephemeralist I’ve spent a fruitful hour browsing them, and here is the most remarkable of what I discovered.
