I came across this article in the NY Times today. It’s about the rise of Heritage Auctions, an online (and in person) auction house that has been growing like crazy over the past two decades thanks to people’s desire to own a little piece of their own childhood.

The stock market, real estate and cryptocurrencies did poorly in 2022, but the global luxury goods market grew 20 percent. People may have had less, but they spent more on fine arts and collectibles that serve no function except to provide pleasure…

Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, which he used to write a shelf of important novels, went for a quarter-million dollars. An Apple 1 computer fetched nearly twice that. A first-generation iPhone, still sealed in its box, sold for $21,000 in December and triple that in February…

Twenty years ago, Heritage had four categories: coins, comics, movie posters and sports. Now it has more than 50, which generated revenue of $1.4 billion last year. Everything, at least in theory, is collectible.

The story focuses on one of these new areas that, until fairly recently, was considered junk: Old VHS tapes, especially tapes that were still sealed and had never been watched. Last June Heritage held its first auction of such tapes run by a collector named Jay Carlson. The auction made more than half a million dollars.

“A man told us he found a sealed first release of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ at Goodwill,” Mr. Carlson said. “He paid a quarter. That will probably go for $20,000.”

Another man had created a time capsule for his son who was born in 1982. He included brand new VHS copies of the first 3 Rocky movies and eventually turned those over to Heritage for sale. In February those three tapes sold for $53,750. That Rocky VHS tape pictured above sold at auction for $27,500.

Heritage is also holding weekly auctions for old video game cartridges, mostly those that are still in the original box and preferably unopened. The amount of money these are trading for is pretty incredible.

Super Mario is a Nintendo game introduced in the mid-1980s that became a global phenomenon and, this month, a new Hollywood movie. In 2017, an unrated copy of the original game brought in $30,000 on eBay, prompting shock and disbelief. Two years later, a cartridge graded 9.4 sold for $100,000 to a group that included Jim Halperin, a founder of Heritage. The purchase was used by Heritage to promote its new auction of graded games.

In the summer of 2021, Heritage auctioned a Super Mario cartridge for $1.56 million, a tenfold increase in two years and the first game to be sold at auction for more than $1 million.

Why would someone pay this for a mass produced game cartridge that isn’t really that old? I can’t explain it.

Spending that amount of money seems crazy to me too and yet I have to confess that I’ve bought things from Heritage in the past. In my case I’ve always had the collector’s impulse, even when I was a kid buying comic books. So this sort of thing seems understandable to me even if the sums involved in some of these transactions are way, way beyond my means. There really is something fun about owning a piece of something you remember from your childhood.

If none of this makes any sense to you, you’re probably the norm. But for people who do like collecting things, and there are a lot of us out there, Heritage is a pretty amazing place. Not interested in VHS tapes or video games? How about original art? Fossils? Rare first edition books? Space memorabilia? There are so many things for sale in a given month you could quite literally spend hours looking at them all. And the good news is that not everything the site sells will break the bank.

Anyway, you can create a free account on their website and see the prices of anything and everything that has sold in the past as well as what’s coming up for sale in the future. Maybe that’s the best part. You don’t have to buy anything to enjoy seeing what other people are buying. It might even give you some ideas for items to sell the next time you dig through that old pile of junk in your attic or basement.