Aug 19, 2014 at 18:35

Nick Latamsing has been watching Arsenal since the 1970s but his life changed forever when he attended a programme fair in 1987. Since that day he’s been collecting Arsenal programmes and a few years ago he completed a collection that included one from every Arsenal fixture played between 1946 and 2006…

How long have you been collecting Arsenal programmes and memorabilia?

I started 35 years ago when I was a schoolboy and then it grew from there. I started doing it seriously in 1987. Arsenal did a programme fair as they used to do after the last home game of the season and a mate invited me along. And that was it – I got the bug! I still sit with the guy who got me started now! We laugh about that story sometimes. My dad used to print Chelsea and Wembley programmes during the 1940s so maybe I got the bug from him as well!

Six decades of Arsenal programmes must take up a fair bit of space?

They do and you can’t store them in the garage in case they get damp! I was living at my mum’s when I started but I had my own place by the time the collection started getting big. I think she’d have thrown them all away if I’d carried on storing them at hers!

What do your friends and family have to say about it?

My wife has always been supportive. She used to take the piss in the early days but once it started getting bigger she didn’t mind at all because it was an investment. I sold the collection to pay for the extension on my house a couple of years back. I still have stuff left but I think I sold at the right time.

How much did you sell your collection for?

I sold it all as individual lots. It would probably have been too much money for someone to take the whole lot together but if I had to value it I’d say the complete collection – including tickets – was worth £80,000 easy. A mate of mine is stockbroker and he bought a programme from the opening day of the football league in 1888 and paid £20,000 for it. It was a single piece of A5 paper.

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