I have collected several telephone books for the Los Angeles area, from as far back as 1932. White pages, and later, yellow. It is nice to look back to see entries for members of the family, at various years, various (and changing) addresses...
They are a prompt and an aid to recall other people, businesses, as well.
Phone books are a form of dictionary, but in reverse : giving the meanings (name, address, nature of business if any), where the numbers (the "words," that is) are not in any order. The exception of course was for reverse telephone directories, that were used by the police, I believe.
A near cousin to them are city directories, that allow one to basically walk down a street, odd side, even side, address to address, and see what was there. Some of these can be found via archive.org.
Thanks for your thought-provoking post. Those of us who were early Internet enthusiasts can't help but despair at the level of information control. Read what we let you read and rewrite with AI to say what we want you to say.
“…as static and alphabetical…” yes, yes. They were talismans of a time when a given snapshot of reality stood a chance of remaining accurate on a time scale that accommodated the (slow) speed at which short term memory oozes, through slowly permeable membranes, into long term memory.
Insightful post. It's fascinating how much about social practices can be revealed by a study of mundane media artifacts, particularly those that have become obsolete.
I'm reminded of Harvey Sacks's discussion in Lectures on Conversation of how the arrival of the telephone circa 1900 created three new social roles in households: the caller, the called, and the answerer. The person in the role of the answerer was in the tricky position of not knowing whether or not they'd also take on the role of the called. This created, as Sacks wrote, a complicated and sometimes fraught familial dynamic around every incoming call:
"It’s from among the possible calleds that answerers are selected; answerer being now a merely potential resting state, where you’ve made preparations for turning out to be the called right off when you say 'Hello.' Answerers can become calleds, or they can become non-calleds-but-talked-to, or they can remain answerers, in the sense of not being talked to themselves, and also having what turn out to be obligations incumbent on being an answerer-not-called; obligations like getting the called or taking a message for the called.
"Having done the picking up of the phone, they have been turned into someone at the mercy of the treatment that the caller will give them: What kind of jobs are they going to impose? Are they even going to talk to them? A lot of family world is implicated in the way those little things come out, an enormous amount of conflict turning on being always the answerer and never the called, and battles over who is to pick up the phone."
When the mobile phone replaced the communal phone, it also, of course, meant the end of the role of the answerer.
I remember “peak phone book” — the era when we would receive multiple versions from competing publishers in addition to the “official” Bell Canada publication.
This also got me thinking of the paper maps we kept in our cars; Perly’s “Map Books” were the gold standard, and a CAA “TripTik” a must for any serious summer drive.
I have collected several telephone books for the Los Angeles area, from as far back as 1932. White pages, and later, yellow. It is nice to look back to see entries for members of the family, at various years, various (and changing) addresses...
They are a prompt and an aid to recall other people, businesses, as well.
Phone books are a form of dictionary, but in reverse : giving the meanings (name, address, nature of business if any), where the numbers (the "words," that is) are not in any order. The exception of course was for reverse telephone directories, that were used by the police, I believe.
A near cousin to them are city directories, that allow one to basically walk down a street, odd side, even side, address to address, and see what was there. Some of these can be found via archive.org.
Ammon Shea's book is special.
Thanks for your thought-provoking post. Those of us who were early Internet enthusiasts can't help but despair at the level of information control. Read what we let you read and rewrite with AI to say what we want you to say.
“…as static and alphabetical…” yes, yes. They were talismans of a time when a given snapshot of reality stood a chance of remaining accurate on a time scale that accommodated the (slow) speed at which short term memory oozes, through slowly permeable membranes, into long term memory.
Insightful post. It's fascinating how much about social practices can be revealed by a study of mundane media artifacts, particularly those that have become obsolete.
I'm reminded of Harvey Sacks's discussion in Lectures on Conversation of how the arrival of the telephone circa 1900 created three new social roles in households: the caller, the called, and the answerer. The person in the role of the answerer was in the tricky position of not knowing whether or not they'd also take on the role of the called. This created, as Sacks wrote, a complicated and sometimes fraught familial dynamic around every incoming call:
"It’s from among the possible calleds that answerers are selected; answerer being now a merely potential resting state, where you’ve made preparations for turning out to be the called right off when you say 'Hello.' Answerers can become calleds, or they can become non-calleds-but-talked-to, or they can remain answerers, in the sense of not being talked to themselves, and also having what turn out to be obligations incumbent on being an answerer-not-called; obligations like getting the called or taking a message for the called.
"Having done the picking up of the phone, they have been turned into someone at the mercy of the treatment that the caller will give them: What kind of jobs are they going to impose? Are they even going to talk to them? A lot of family world is implicated in the way those little things come out, an enormous amount of conflict turning on being always the answerer and never the called, and battles over who is to pick up the phone."
When the mobile phone replaced the communal phone, it also, of course, meant the end of the role of the answerer.
I remember “peak phone book” — the era when we would receive multiple versions from competing publishers in addition to the “official” Bell Canada publication.
This also got me thinking of the paper maps we kept in our cars; Perly’s “Map Books” were the gold standard, and a CAA “TripTik” a must for any serious summer drive.
Great writeup.
Chalk up phone books with objective news reporting as sacrifices on the altar of "progress".
We are all unlisted.