Louisville’s Disappearing Telephone Books by Thomas McAdam Like direct-mail advertising, telephone books will continue to arrive at your address, unbidden, so long as they are profitable.įor additional information, check out these articles: And, what’s more, those revenue figures are growing.” Slate’s reporter calculated “that’s more than $22 in revenue per copy. All those millions of directories last year, they say, generated revenues of $13.9 billion, according to an article from. The Yellow Pages Association reports that business is good. William Kantor\’s Zyzzy Ztamp Ztudioz is listed last-on page 1858-of the Manhattan directory. Yet the industry produces, according to a Louisville reporter’s calculation, over 1 million tons of phone books each year. Some recycling programs refuse to accept them. Heavy ink saturation on the pages, low-grade paper, and the glued binding prevent them from disintegrating like other paper products. There is a concern about the environmental affect of old telephone books. Often a new set arrives before the old set has been used. Residents in most cities receive more than one set a year, broken into multiple volumes for neighborhoods. Even as Americans are turning to the Internet as their prime source of information, phone book producers are distributing more directories than ever before. The number of telephone books published each year has risen since 1954, as you might expect: from 60 million to 615 million. “‘Profane or obscene language over the company’s wires is prohibited… Failure to observe this will constitute cause for discontinuing service.'” The summer, 1953, directory for Cascade, Montana, lists only 182 names, but a word of warning inside the cover indicates that men are still men in the shadow of the Rocky Mountain: “Instructions for use are less involved today, but they are still quite specific. Speak clearly and distinctly, with your lips gently TOUCHING the telephone.’ “‘ When you are called from the Central Office, answer by ringing your bell the same number of times as your call, i.e., if your call is three, answer three: then turn the switch to the right and use your telephone. The Pringles quote “instructions for the proper use of instruments” in an early phone directory. The New York Telephone Company, which had to supply new books, still shudders at the memory.” The shredded pages of 5,000 directories were showered on her at a cost, in those inexpensive days, of a couple of thousand dollars. A record was chalked up on Gertrude Ederle’s triumphant arrival to New York after she swam the English Channel in 1926. And nothing much can be done to stop people from tearing pages out of the directors for use as confetti when a parade is staged for some returning hero. At New York’s Grand Central Terminal fresh books are required every forty-eight hours. A staff of inspectors roam such busy centers as railroad and bus stations to see if directory replacements are necessary. “Otherwise civilized people have a deplorable habit of tearing out pages at booths and in hotel rooms instead of copying down the numbers. Scattered throughout the story of how phone companies updated and replaced directories are several historical details of interest. Bell Telephone executives estimated “the cost of publishing and delivering a directory the size of a Manhattan book is approximately $1.50.” A third was the immense costs of production. Another challenge was distributing the massive volumes. The chief headache, the Pringles explained, was hand-checking the accuracy of every name and number. It described how incredibly complex the task of producing America’s phone books was. In 1954 the Post printed “Sixty Million Headaches Every Year” by Henry and Katherine Pringle. Directories became even more important when automatic switching became widespread a few years later allowing callers to find a number and dial their party directly without help from an operator. By 1910, America’s telephone books were keeping track of 7,000,000 phone numbers. It listed the numbers of 11 homes, 38 businesses, and the Police Department. This week marks the anniversary of the first phone directory, issued in New Haven, Connecticut, on February 21, 1878.
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