Back in 1977 Carol Bayer Sager was enjoying a number six chart hit in the UK with her quirky song “You’re Moving Out Today”. The lyrics included a long list of items that were being moved amongst them ‘your 61 cassettes’, ‘your dirty books’, ‘your 45’s’ and a ‘map of Mozambique’. Cassettes, books, records and perhaps maps to a lesser extent were all highly collectable back then.

Meanwhile Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery were continuing to build a huge collection of artefacts that were impossible to display simultaneously. It seems that few questions were asked about the origins of some items and they were not always well collated. Amongst them were a Sultanganj Buddha from India, many mummified animals and an Inuit kayak.

The ten year old version of myself was busy starting a collection of his own. Mine was football programmes. The idea was that they were not only going to give me pleasure reading and owning but also grow tremendously in financial value. That was the theory anyway. Included in the collection were Liverpool FC home and aways, cup finals and obscure non league teams. As I edged towards becoming a teenager the collecting bug expanded to include PG Tips cards, books and to a lesser extent stamps.

Fast forward almost fifty years and the landscape described above has changed beyond recognition. Moving out has become a lot less labour intensive than when Bayer Sager was gracing Top of the Pops that’s for certain. Although cassettes and vinyl have been making a small nostalgia driven comeback that way of listening to music represents a tiny fraction of the market set against streaming.

The actual number of ‘dirty books’ being moved is not specified but they would be reduced by around a quarter in 2025 as ebooks continue to make their mark. It’s also entirely possible that the map of Mozambique will have been usurped by a digital version called up via a Google search.

As far as Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is concerned a recent visit there (ostensibly to see the Ozzy Osbourne collection) made it clear they too had taken a new view on collecting. This was proven by their exhibition ‘The Elephant in the Room’. One of the main reasons for it being to illustrate that items to do with empire, colonialism, repatriation and human remains would not be blithely gathered and displayed as they were previously.

Lastly (and the main inspiration for this blog) is what has ultimately transpired from my own experiences of collecting. A mention here for Swedish Death Cleaning which is defined as ‘a decluttering process where you remove unnecessary items from your home to make it easier for loved ones to manage your belongings after you die’. Thus inspired I set about my football programme collection with a view to selling them both to raise some cash for myself and to donate to charity so they could raise some money from them also.

Sadly though the market for most football programmes seems to have died a death. Whole seasons bundles of Liverpool FC home programmes appearing on eBay for twenty pounds for example. FA Cup Finals that would have been amongst the gold standard of such collectibles are available for a fiver and non league ones are almost impossible to give away. Whether it’s because the market has become flooded or because younger generations are accustomed to getting their information digitally I’m not sure.

My books and PG Tips cards led to similar disappointment. Literally hundreds of volumes of the same books that I treasured over the years were already being sold in charity shops for 75p. Or two for a pound if you wanted to push the boat out. Volunteers looked doubtfully when they were handed over the counter as donations. Knowing both that they needed to remain polite but also that they weren’t going to be easy to sell on while taking quite a lot of space in the sorting room.

The PG Tips card collection had been painfully assembled. Inching forward at one card a week as my family didn’t drink much tea. Then inevitably having to send off for the missing ones (at was an exorbitant cost in the early 80s) when a new series started. None of these struggles seems to cut any muster with the eBay generation though, like football programmes their value is negligible. When the expense of posting and packaging them is added on to the effort of actually listing them on eBay the proposition is no longer viable. So, it’s back to the charity shop to receive the same reception from the volunteers as with the aforementioned books.