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ago, maybe eight years ago, somewhere in there, I built what I call the record house, which lives
right next to my house. We live on just about five acres in the rural countryside in Oregon, and
there was room for another house next to our house, so I built one [laughing] and I made it look
just like our house, but instead of having people live in it, records live in it and there's a half a
million records that live in it.
BiTS: Half a million.
JT: All filed now. All filed by genre and artist and number and all that and I can find anything
within a few minutes if I walk down the aisles and look for it. That's what I work out of now and it
has an office and kitchen and everything. I could live in it, but I don't. The records live in it, and I
live next door.
BiTS: I take it that the floors are all reinforced and that sort of thing because of the weight of the
things.
JT: Oh, well yeah. We had an architect design it
because of the weight of the 78s and all that, yeah.
We had to have a special design and it's all climate-
controlled and temperature-controlled and
everything. It's like a state-of-the-art archival facility
and it could be an actual archive or museum if
somebody wanted to do that, but nobody's going to
come out to rural Southern Oregon to look at a
museum of that stuff, but it's set up as if it is one.
BiTS: John, make sure nothing happens to it
[laughing].
JT: Well, yeah. I do my best for that. I mean, we have
the occasional wildfires or something. It's all
earthquake-proof. We designed it to be completely
earthquake-proof. The shelves are bolted to the wall,
bolted to the ceiling, bolted to the floor and there's
bars in front of each of the shelves that you have to
lift off in order to get to the records, so in order for
this building to collapse, we would have to have an
earthquake so bad, that the entire house would
John Tefteller in his state-of-the-art archival
crumble.
facility
BiTS: [Chuckling] Fingers crossed for you then.
JT: I think we're fine.
BiTS: Tell me something about your methodology at the moment. You mentioned putting ads in
magazines and things. That's what you used to do. Do you still do that now?
JT: No. No, I have my own personal mailing list of about 3000 people that collect different forms of
vintage records. Mostly 50s and 60s rock and roll and rhythm and blues with a smaller amount that
are into the early 20s and 30s stuff, and I send out a monthly list on paper. I think I'm the last one
that sends out a monthly list on paper. You can also see it on the internet. It's on my website, so
people look at it on the website if they have a computer, but I deal with a lot of older collectors who