Pick up a rental cassette from a bin at a car-boot sale and the first thing you read is not the cover. You read the stickers. A yellow neon "£1 OVERNIGHT" pasted across the actor's face. A red genre flag, HORROR, half-curling at the corners. A barcode sticker on top of an older barcode sticker. A "BE KIND, REWIND" in a typeface designed by someone who had three hours and a Letraset catalogue. Then, underneath all of it, the original sleeve art the distributor paid an illustrator £400 for in 1986.

These layers were not meant to be a record of anything. The shop manager wanted to flag the new releases on Tuesday and the late returners on Friday, so he peeled the old sticker off, or didn't, and slapped a new one over the top. Twelve years later, when the shop closed and the stock went to a wholesaler and from there into a cardboard box at a market in Wolverhampton, the sleeve carried the entire commercial autobiography of one rental counter. Price changes. Genre reshelvings. The week the BBFC sticker for an 18 was added because a parent had complained. The fortnight in 1992 when the shop ran a promotion on tapes that had not been hired in six months.

This is what Jacky Lawrence and Josh Schafer's Stuck on VHS: A Visual History of Video Store Stickers, published by Birth.Movies.Death. and sold through Mondo, has the patience to take seriously. A hundred and sixty pages of it, plus three pages of stickers bound in. The book treats the rental cassette the way a museum treats a Roman ostracon, as a thing that accidentally preserved the conditions of its own use, because nobody at the time thought the conditions were worth preserving.

What the layered stickers carry is not nostalgia. Or not only nostalgia. They carry the economics of the late video shop, the way a small business managed shelf-space without a database, the margin of error in a manual stock system. You can read a price war on a single sleeve, the £3.50 of 1989 crossed out, the £2.50 of 1991 crossed out, the 99p of 1996 underneath the "CLOSING DOWN" flash. The rental shop was a kind of analogue spreadsheet, and the spine of every tape was a row in it.

Academic paratextual work has caught up to this only recently. The 2023 Accidental Archivism volume, written for cinema archivists trying to figure out what to do with the rogue archives of fan sites and zine collections, mentions VHS sleeves in the same breath as performance scripts and photocopied pamphlets. The implication is that the sleeve is a document, which means the stickers are an annotation layer on the document, which means the rental shop, without intending to, ran a forty-year participatory archive on the high street.

It died, of course, on the back of a worse archive. Streaming keeps no sticker. There is no overdue flag on a Netflix browse page, no genre tag in fluorescent yellow that the manager hand- applied because the official one had peeled off. The metadata is clean, complete, and impossible to read against itself. You can't see, on Prime Video, that someone in 1994 thought Predator 2 should be reshelved from action to sci-fi, or that the Friday sticker fell off in the rain. There is no record of the disagreements.

The sleeves at the car-boot sale still hold theirs. Take one home and peel a corner. There will be another sticker underneath. Then another.

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