Last spring, the local Border’s bookstore was closing, and all books in the store on the last day cost $1. I loaded up on books for the library, including one by Ammon Shea titled The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book that Everyone Uses but No One Reads. Yes, I understand that it’s a book about the history of the phone book, but I promise that it’s fascinating. (Plus, it talks about cuttlefish!) Here’s a 10 list of things that I learned.
-Some telephone books insert fake listings so they can tell if other people copy their information. The fake entries are called Mountweazels because of a fake entry for Lillian Mountweazel that was included in an edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. (Read John Green’s Paper Towns!)
-According to the Supreme Court, the telephone book is completely lacking in creativity and thus not subject to copyright law.
-In the first part of the twentieth century, the San Francisco Chinatown phone book was organized geography (not alphabetically) and produced by hand over two weeks by resident Sam Wong. He hand painted the letters using a block of ink called mock which was made from the ink sacs of cuttlefish of the Monterey Bay.
-The District Telephone Company of New Hampshire produced the world’s first commercial telephone exchange and telephone book (1882), the world’s first telephone booth (1878), the world’s first coin-operated telephone (1879), and the first school for telephone operators in the United States (1907).
-James Baker was arrested in the 1920s. He admitted to 8-10 murders, and he was known for ripping the phone book over his victims and scattering the scraps over people that he killed. (The New York police department at the time was known for its corruption, so it’s impossible to tell if the story is true.)
-Hello was not widely used as a greeting before the telephone. Thomas Edison recommended that it be used when one answered the phone. His rival Alexander Graham Bell preferred ahoy. Other possibilities were, “Do I get you” and “Are you there?”
-In 1916, Clark University researched the most efficient organization of names and numbers in the telephone book. Researchers ran almost 4000 tests in which they timed subjects while they looked up numbers laid out in a variety of formats. The final decision for optimum efficiency was four columns to a page, 11 numbers to the inch, and staggered indentation.
-The Journal of Analytical Chemistry published an article about the smell of old books. The off-gassing several hundred VOCs is what we associate with the smell, and the authors characterized the scent as “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.” `
-Environmental opponents of the telephone book claim that the industry is responsible for killing 5 million trees each year. The telephone book industry counters that most books are made from paper and sawdust salvaged from paper mills.
-A clause in the 1996 Telecommunications Act gave individuals the power to publish their own versions of the telephone book. Because yellow page advertisements bring in a significant amount of money (14 million per year in the US), people in some communities receive a half dozen telephone books each year because of competing telephone book companies.
I easily could keep going. The whole book is full of tidbits like these. Consider picking it up if you want information to impress people at parties.
