TL;DR
Ammon Shea’s 2010 history of the telephone directory, from a fifty-name list in 1878 to the doorstop that landed on every porch. It’s short, funny and full of things nobody thought to ask about the phone book.
Ammon Shea once read the entire Oxford English Dictionary, all twenty volumes and more than twenty-one thousand pages, and wrote a book about it. Then he turned to a book with an even worse plot.
The phone book.
What is The Phone Book about?
The whole history of the directory. The first one, printed by the New Haven District Telephone Company in February 1878, listed fifty subscribers and had no numbers in it at all, because the operator knew everyone and you asked for people by name. A second New Haven directory followed within the year, carried advertising and was labeled Volume 1, Number 1. A copy of it sold at auction in 2008 for $170,500.
Growth came fast. American telephone subscribers went from 30,000 to 50,000 during 1880 alone, and by 1954 about sixty million directories were being printed every year. Shea covers Reuben H. Donnelley, whose firm became the biggest directory printer of the twentieth century and showed how much money there was in yellow-page ads, and AT&T’s 1961 campaign that told people to let their fingers do the walking.
The side stories are the fun part. San Francisco’s Chinatown had its own handwritten Chinese directory, and the operators there memorized the subscribers. Lawyers weren’t allowed to advertise in phone books until 1977. The semanticist S. I. Hayakawa fought the phone company’s move from named exchanges like PEnnsylvania 6-5000 to all-number dialing. Early directories even told people what to say when they picked up: hello.
Shea also covers the collectors, the artists who work with old directories, the strongmen who tore them in half on stage and the people who changed their names so they’d be listed first, or last.
He’s honest about one irony. When he wrote it, he didn’t have a listed number himself. The landline was in his wife’s name.
Who is Ammon Shea?
A writer and lexicographer who has worked as a consulting editor of American dictionaries for Oxford University Press. Before that he was a gondolier, a mover and a street musician. His books include Reading the OED, the account of his year with the dictionary, and Bad English, a history of the words and usages that annoy people. Perigee published The Phone Book in October 2010.
Why did phone books matter?
Being listed meant being findable. For a century, the directory was how you found a plumber, a doctor, an old friend or the business down the street. Being in it was a sign you’d arrived. Steve Martin built a whole comic scene around that in The Jerk, where seeing his own name in the new directory is the happiest moment of his life.
Then the internet arrived, the directories thinned out, and most cities stopped delivering them.
Why does The Phone Book belong on this shelf?
Writers of period fiction need these details. A character flipping through the white pages for a name, or tearing out a page so nobody else can find it, is a scene that only works in its era. Shea’s book is a handy reference for how directories worked and what they meant to the people who used them.
It’s also a good example of a writer finding a story in something everybody took for granted. Most of the best nonfiction starts that way.
Keep reading
Obsolete things in fiction: phone books, Rolodexes, card catalogs and the other vanished objects that still make good scenes.
- The Phone Book, Penguin Books Australia
- The First Telephone Book Had Fifty Listings and No Numbers, Smithsonian Magazine
Frequently Asked Questions
Other Books From – History
