Brazilian Vinyl Record Collector Looking to Make His Five Million Strong Collection Public

If you thought your dozen crates worth of vinyl was impressive, think again. Brazilian bus company operator/record addict Zero Freitas has five-million and counting records in his 25,000-square-foot warehouse.

In an interview with The New York Times, Freitas confessed he had been seeing a therapist for the past 40 years to try and explain the obsession to himself. By the time he graduated high school he had collected 3,000 records, and by age 30 there were 30,000. The numbers skyrocketed after his bus company expanded and he acquired collections from former music-store owner Paul Mawhinney and celebrated enthusiast Murray Gershenz, whose combined collections totalled upwards of three million.

To look after the unofficial but unquestionably largest record collection in the world, Freitas has a team of interns that catalogue around 500 records a day, an endless task due to the consistent purchases of Freitas and his international buyers; last year alone he acquired more than a dozen shipping containers each holding more than 100,000 records.

His master plan is to eventually turn the extensive archive into a public non-profit library dubbed Emporium Musical. He envisions it as a “sort of library”, with listening stations set up among the thousands of shelves. If there are multiple copies of records, visitors will be able to take them home.

Via New York Times