You wouldn’t know it today, but at one time, the entire concept of watching Hollywood movies in your own home was a revolutionary idea. We rented and bought movies like crazy, and watched them over and over. This craze brought with it a new art form -that of the home video cover. Now that VHS has given way to on-demand streaming, that art form is part of history. The 1980s and ‘90s were its heyday.

That lost art form is curated in a new book VHS: Video Cover Art by Thomas “The Dude Designs” Hodge. It contains over 240 full-scale, complete video sleeves of all movie genres, with designs ranging from the mundane to the insane. The book explores the images, typography, and sometimes hilarious text that was designed to reach out and grab you from the shelves of the movie rental store. Author Tom "The Dude Designs" Hodge writes:

My work has been built around a lifelong love (bordering on obsession at times!) of VHS and the amazing artwork used to adorn video covers. They were ingrained in my psyche from the first time I ever entered a video store as a child. I have a particular fondness for video art from the UK (my home country) as many of the covers were specially commissioned by independent distributors and not seen much outside of this market.

This incredible artwork was created by amazing artists such as Enzo Sciotti, Renato Casaro, Caudio Casaro, Brian Bysouth, Graham Humphreys, and Laurent Melki. Many artists sadly remain unnamed. The one thing they all held in common is the style and spirit of pure unabashed creativity, where art and film came together in a visual orgy of mustached muscled men, buxom beauties, big explosions, phallic guns,and nightmare-inducing monsters. Sadly this art form largely disappeared along with demise of the VHS format.

Neatorama is proud to bring you a sampling of the cover art from the book VHS: Video Cover Art.

VHS: Video Cover Art will be available in May through Schiffer Publishing and at a bookstore near you. You can pre-order your copy now from Amazon.