The Phone Book by Ammon Shea

The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads by Ammon Shea is definitely the sort of book that you hear about and think it's quirky, but will never read. Well, that sort of book is catnip for me. 

Shea walks us through the history of the phone book (first it was just a list of people who had phones!) and reminisces about watching it decline. I don't actually remember when we got our last yellow pages, but we haven't had one since we moved to our current house. 

I recently saw this question on our town's Facebook page:

An answer: A cohesive directory of all the stores, restaurants, services that already exist. LOLOL. Suggestions were that the Chamber of Commerce collate this. 

Anyway, this is a surprisingly funny book because Shea makes snarky asides in footnotes and he's sort of a weird dude and some of that comes across. I was glad I took the time to read this because it really is true that a good writer can make anything interesting, isn't it? 

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

...I hope we can all agree that it's too bad that another one of the recommendations of the November 1878 telephone directory has not survived to the present day; the book advised that the proper way to end a conversation was with the phrase "That is all."  (page 19)

YES!! Sometimes I don't really mean it when I say good-bye, what I really want to say is that is all. 

You can still send telegraphs in many other countries, such as Telegrams Canada.*

*Its website says, "You'll see why even after 160 years, telegrams never go out of style!" which is a statement that makes me wonder what other things this company is delusional about. (page 49)

That footnote made me cackle. I looked it up, though, and it does appear as if Telegrams Canada is still in business, so maybe the company is on to something. 

When telephone books were in their infancy, there was no need of numbers - all one had to do was give a name to an operator, who would then connect the call. Many of the first telephone books had no numbers at all. (page 54)

Can you even imagine just a list of names? 

One of the first people in the late nineteenth century to recommend using numbers to indicate each and every subscriber was a physician in Massachusetts, Dr. Moses Greeley Parker. During an outbreak of measles in the city of Lowell, Dr. Parker worried about what would happen if more than one of the city's four operators succumbed to the disease. The telephone system would be paralyzed, since there were no surrogate operators who knew all the numbers and connections to replace them.

At first his suggestion was met with incredulity. Most people were of the opinion that subscribers would sooner give up their telephones entirely rather than submit themselves to the dehumanizing indignity of being identified by a number. Eventually, the obvious necessity of anyone being able to find all the subscribers in a telephone exchange won out, and numbers began to be used. (page 54-55)

Crazy. Social security numbers weren't even a thing until the 1930s. 

Since the lettering system in Chinese is ideographic (it represents ideas through pictures rather than through individual letters) it was not an option to have an alphabetized telephone book. So Wong would arrange the names geographically, based on where in Chinatown each phone was located. (page 71-72)

There's a great 99% Invisible episode on alphabetical order. I think about it a lot. 

I have a habit of smelling books before I read them. Perhaps I should call it by some other name than habit, something that denotes a degree of pleasure. It is not a fetish, nor is it a proclivity, as  I draw no illicit pleasure from it. I simply like to smell books before I read them. When presented with a new book (and I count as new any book that I've never held before), the first thing I do is open the pages to some random spot, insert my nose close to the binding, and take a good, hearty sniff. (page 126-127)

This is one of the weirdest things an author has confessed to, I think. 

...occasional visits to Gimbels department store on Eighty-sixth Street with my grandmother...(page 142)

iykyk

I've begun to anthropomorphize these books, and I wonder on occasion if they are curious and apprehensive about their fate...

When I happen across books that have been thrown away, I always feel a touch of despair that these volumes are so unloved that no one wants them...(page 178-179)

YES!! Maybe I'm weird like the author. 

Things I looked up:

cotter pin (page 24) - a simple, unthreaded metal fastener with two tines. It is inserted through a pre-drilled hole in a bolt, shaft, or clevis pin and its legs are bent outward to secure an assembly. It is primarily used to prevent other fasteners from loosening. It looks like a bobby pin. 

Schuylkill River (page 28) - a river in eastern Pennsylvania in the United States. It flows for 135 miles from Pottsville southeast to Philadelphia where it joins the Delaware River as one of its largest tributaries

Karle Hoefle phone book covers (page 83) - From 1959-1971, Karl Hoefle, a commercial artist from Dallas, designed covers for Southwestern Bell Yellow Pages in several cities. 

photo of Thomas Dewey sitting on phone books (page 86) - Oh, man. Life magazine did Dewey wrong here. In 1944, he was the Republican governor of New York state running against FDR in the presidential election. In the March 20 edition of Life, there was a long article about Dewey in the governor's mansion in Albany. The caption reads: The Executive Chamber, rarely used except for clemency hearings, is a cavernous, mahogany-walled relic of past governors and state grandeur. Around window (clockwise) are portraits of Lafayette and Governors Odell, Cleveland, and Seward. The desk in this room is so large, the chair so deep, that Tom Dewey sits on two telephone books when being photographed here. (italics mine) Ouch.

My level of dedication is that I looked up the March 20 edition of Life to see this photo. YOU ARE WELCOME.

Princess phone (page 114) - The Princess telephone was introduced by the Bell System in 1959. It was a compact telephone designed for convenient use in the bedroom, and contained a light-up dial for use as a night-light. It was commonly advertised with the slogan "It's little...It's lovely...It lights"

By User:Mcheath - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25763482

A woman named Jolis Paons created an entire dress out of nothing more than part of a copy of the white pages (Indianapolis, I believe). From a slight distance it looks like a delicate fabric, light gray folded hundreds of times with crisp lines that make it look like a new and special material. On closer inspection, the numbers begin to become apparent, but it still doesn't look like anything like a mass of crumpled and folded paper, which is essentially what it is. (page 186)

I want to wear this dress. 

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

That an instrument as common and simple as the telephone needed instructions may come as a surprise, almost as if it turned out that nineteenth-century Americans needed written assistance to put on their hats. (page 37)

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Do you have a phone book in your house? When is the last time you used it? Would you wear that dress?