Reply #12: There's a place here that'll make you head spin. [View All]

Big old brick building with two floors of used vinyl. It looks like a mess but it actually is sort of organized.

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EDIT: Here a virtual tour. http://kanesville.tripod.com/kanesville/tour.html

From THE CITY WEEKLY, 11/30-12/06 2005

Stepping into Tim Behrens’ Kanesville Used Records store in Council Bluffs is a little overwhelming at first – the walls are plastered with posters, T-shirts and comics. After your eyes adjust you see that the main floor is full of endless amounts of racks stuffed with LPs.

But a customer asks about a particular record, and Behrens immediately points him in the right direction. Another calls and Behrens picks out their request within twenty seconds.

Unorganized, it is not.

It is hard to imagine a store containing three-fourths of a million of anything. Much less keep track of and organize that much inventory.


But Behrens’ does, with around 750,000 rare and out of print records in its store, plus a ton – and when I say a ton, I mean tens of thousands – of other collectibles such as comics, old magazines and movies.

“It’s probably the largest collection of records in the Midwest,” owner Tim Behrens said. “We’ve had people sifting through the collection from open to close, for an entire week.”

Behrens opened his store in 1978 and moved to his current location in 1985. The current building has a main floor full of LPs and 45s, plus an upstairs and downstairs full of more records and 78s.

That’s 10,000 square ft. of collectibles – but don’t be intimidated.

Despite the insanely large collection of vinyl in his store, it is incredibly well organized alphabetically.

“We just have more volume than other places,” Behrens said. “Therefore we have more to choose from. We have a full time employee on hand to organize it.”

Kanesville also sells cassette tapes, 8-track tapes, VHS movies and DVDs.