Passion for vintage magazines drives 100,000-strong collection
Tucked away on the outskirts of a small town in Lincolnshire is a collector's paradise.
Inside a small warehouse in Sleaford, across the road from a car garage, five rooms are kept in complete darkness.
When the lights are turned on, visitors are presented with shelves stacked floor to ceiling with magazines.
Jackie Holmes believes she has about 100,000 copies of vintage editions, from Vogue to Radio Times.
The collection developed from her love of reading and buying fashion magazines, but now also includes celebrity and music publications.
"There's a lot still to catalogue," Holmes tells the Secret Lincolnshire podcast.
"It's such a time-consuming process. I've got hundreds and thousands, probably, of TV and Radio Times going back to the 50s and the 60s."
As we walk into a ground-floor room, Jackie turns on the big fluorescent lights and I can see long rows of fashion magazines, stacked in plastic bags.
They include vintage editions of Harpers and Vogue, some dating from as far back as the 1930s.
"Some of them definitely show their age now because they are very fragile," Holmes adds.
Collectors have long sought early editions of comic books – in January the first Superman comic sold for $15m (£11.2m) – but experts say the market for more humble magazines has also grown in recent years.
It means many people who cannot bear to throw away their old collections could have cash in their attic.
In 2024, an "extraordinary collection" of 3,000 copies of the NME sold for more than £2,500 at auction. Tony Howard, from Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire, began his collection in the 1960s and decided to sell it to free up space in his loft.
Colin Young, a Lincoln-based auctioneer and antiques expert on the BBC's Bargain Hunt, has his own collection of the NME, dating from about 1980 to 1984, and says there is a "really strong, really good market" for them.
In part, this is because people of all generations remember magazines "that relate to their youth experiences".
Young says there is "an absolute passion and desire" for magazines. Auction sales have gone from 400 to 500 people, both in the room and online, to about "3,000, 4,000 maybe, of these people that were sat at home and avidly looking for those old magazines".
"We've never lived in a time where there has been so many people so passionate about collecting," he adds.
"Is it at it's height? No, I would say that was about 2020. Are we still on a high? Absolutely."
For his part, Young is holding on to his collection, because it is an important part of his life and "indie music is a great thing".
Holmes has turned her hobby into an online business, with about 35,000 of her magazines – about a third of the collection – now up for sale on her website.
Her buyers include collectors, researchers, film archivists from all over the world and people looking for unusual birthday presents.
She expects some editions of Vogue to raise almost £300.
Some of the older, more popular, editions are getting harder to find, however.
"They just run out continually and people are asking for them again and again," she explains.
Holmes says the growth in popularity of collecting means she now faces "an endless task" to find stock.
"There's nothing like looking through an older magazine just to take you back in time," she says.
"A lot of the teen magazines like Jackie, Blue Jeans, Oh Boy, Look-in, they're really collectible now. So, I've got huge amounts of those."
Old copies of popular articles or interviews with musicians are also sought after.
It is a different story when it comes to newer magazines, because fewer physical copies are being sold in shops.
"I don't find many teen magazines that you can actually buy off the newsagent shelves at the moment," Holmes explains.
"It's difficult to know what younger people of today's teenage years now look for in a magazine because we have just got it all online."
Nevertheless, as long as vintage magazines remain popular, she does not see a shelf life to the business.
It is nice, she says, to just sit down and "flick through a magazine and just lose yourself".
Listen to highlights fromLincolnshire on BBC Sounds, watch thelatest episode of Look North.
Download the BBC News app from the App Storefor iPhone and iPad orGoogle Play for Android devices
