This week marked the anniversary of that solemn tome, that august undertaking, the telephone book, in honor of which the Saturday Evening Post has run a fascinating and whimsical piece by Jeff Nillson. The article, which takes much of its material from a 1954 piece in the Post, calls itself a retrospective, but reads like an obituary. It’s filled with juicy stories: from looking at the two pieces together, we learn that before there were star maps, there were peddlers hawking the numbers of stars along Wilshire Boulevard. In the days when people put money in box springs rather than banks, one shopkeeper spent three days searching seventy-five thousand phone books for money he’d left inside.
But before we consign the phone book to history—primarily useful for footstools, booster seats, and Internet pranks—it’s useful to remember the ways that these directories prefigured their more modern replacements. They were, in essence, the first social-media sites, and exploded in a similar manner. Thought The Da Vinci Code or the Bible were the most popular printed works ever? Paul Collins, writing in Slate, says you’re wrong: the phone book is, having gone viral after the first one-page directory was printed in New Haven in February, 1878. The same posturing for attention that we see today on sites like MySpace or Facebook surfaced there, too, as people changed their names to things like Zznar or Aaaaaron to assure a prominently first or last position in the listings. Thought that language was purer b4 the proliferation of SMS shorthand and twitter books? Because of space constraints, telephone books brought abbreviation to an apotheosis unparalleled until texting. (In phone book speak, you could say that you were meeting “wm” at the “delctssn” after seeing your “phys.”)
Of course, if the phone book is dying it’s a problem of heft. Phones are becoming smaller, phone books bigger. Companies worry that elderly customers won’t be able to lift the massive volumes; at one point, the Manhattan directory became so thick that a Central American banana firm was able to use seven thousand copies to bulletproof their trucks. It was even an anecdote of length that struck me most in the history of phone books—perhaps because of the gargantuan monster hanging off my byline, the sort of ungainly thing that causes phone companies printing woes by taking up two lines. It was a 1951 entry in the Altoona, Pennsylvania, directory: Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff, Herbert B. Sometimes words are not enough; sometimes, they are much too much.