The Video Home System, or VHS, format was introduced in the late ’70s, revolutionizing the way people consumed movies. DVD would usurp it at the turn of the century, of course, but you’re hard-pressed to find a Gen Xer or millenial without at least a little video cassette nostalgia. Gen Z has shown an appetite for analog tech as well, finding tactile comfort in tapes, vinyl, CDs and print books in the age of digital subscriptions.
Fans of physical media in the Quad Cities area have a goldmine in The Source. One of the oldest used bookstores in the nation, The Source has spent nearly 90 years in downtown Davenport and houses a massive collection of books, magazines, music and films across 5,000 square feet of space. The business was purchased last year by Stephen Zbornik, who’d been shopping there since he was a teenager, and his partner Anne Brown.
Brown was particularly enthused about the basement. It had been sectioned off and stuffed with old, unwanted records, but had plenty of shelves and bookcases.
“I knew the basement was my baby because I’m interested in that sort of space-making,” she said.
Brown imagined an area dedicated to VHS, since the room, just like the outdated cinematic medium, “was a space that had been previously forgotten.” She cleared it out and got to work on transforming it.
Andrew King, the founder of the Cary Grant Died Here collective, has long been invested in physical media. It was about a decade ago that he and some friends first created a zine named after the Hollywood actor (and the real fact that Grant passed away in Davenport in 1986, while preparing for a show at the Adler Theatre), called Cary Grant Died Here. That was the collective’s first iteration.
A Davenport native, King moved to Rhode Island to get a change of scenery in the untimely spring of 2020. On a visit back, during a party at Rozz-Tox, he was reminded of the “crazy, beautiful” creative energy in the area, so he came back in October 2023 and exhumed Cary Grant in print. But King was eager to do more video projects, and that’s where videographer and Quad Cities local Khalil Hacker came in.
“Growing up as a teenager in the Midwest, you get this feeling of ‘I’m living in a small town, I want to go somewhere bigger, do something bigger,’” Hacker said. “But the older I got, the more appreciation I had for the community here.”
The two officially met through a mutual friend upon King’s return, and their collaboration began.
King saw Brown’s curatorial work at Source, and the small basement room immediately reminded him of the Criterion Collection and the home entertainment distribution company’s popular video series Criterion Closet Picks. These videos see artists enter a closet stocked with Criterion’s robust collection of films. The artist then chooses a handful of Blu-rays to keep while sharing why.
King suggested doing their own version of the Criterion Closet with Brown’s VHS room.
“I spent my entire 20s worrying about being original, and now that I’m in my 30s, I don’t care anymore. I just wanna have fun,” King said. “You can rack your brain trying to reinvent the wheel when you just don’t have to. Find something popular, turn it two degrees to the right, localize it, bam.”
Just like that, VHStacks was born.
First, they decided to draft the guest list: who would be in front of the camera? King knew he wanted to pull from his well of creative friends in the Quad Cities, including local musicians, artists and dwellers of hubs like The Last Picture House, Rozz-Tox and The Midwest Writing Center — even Anne Brown herself. The inclusion of these community members makes the series feel intimate and tender. They typically film the videos in batches, so that sense of camaraderie is present on the shoot, and reflected in the final product.
“Doing these little features with people [gives them] a chance to see themselves how I see them, to put some limelight on them,” King said. Hacker similarly wanted the look of the series to radiate that close-knit energy: “We both like this series to feel a bit more raw, so we leave in a little bit more of the messy, getting-ready-to-shoot sections, and I think it humanizes the series quite a bit.”
Little touches like using a static, scratch effect for transitions reinforce Hacker’s goal of the series feeling like the viewer “put a tape in, and this is what came up.”
VHStacks is a casual yet special series that exemplifies the intersection of art and community. Brown thinks it captures the specific charm of VHS as a product. “The VHS format is really beautiful for browsing,” he said; the tapes’ matte covers and wider spines are more legible, and therefore enjoyable to search through.VHStacks is a great opportunity to browse through the creative offerings of the Quad Cities, and what it looks like when a collective of passionate, artistic, cool people make space for media, and for each other.
Source Bookstore
232 West 3rd St, Davenport
Open 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Monday-Saturday, and 12 p.m.-4 p.m. Sunday
This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2026 issue.
