![]() ![]() For most people, or for me at least, 10 or 11 is the age you start to get a sense of the world outside your home. The ones I looked at mostly were the yellow and white pages from when I was 10 years old. What was your experience of reading these books?Ī. It gives you an interesting and complete picture of what was happening. Nobody cares who’s selling a possum in New York City or record parts in Havana in 1942, but it includes that. The phone book, especially the yellow pages, because they’re dispassionate and unemotional records about what they’re documenting, is very complete. It’s one of their most important and frequently requested objects. An extreme example is the University of Miami – I’m pretty sure – has a copy of the last telephone book in Cuba that was printed before Castro took over. I think there’s also an enormous amount of information you can get from looking into a telephone book. I don’t think anything is devoid of creativity. I don’t quite agree with Sandra Day O’Connor for several reasons. I would say yes, the content does matter. Steve Martin’s character was so excited to see his name in the book because it meant he had arrived. I prefer Steve Martin’s take from “The Jerk” – right before he’s in the gas station and some maniac looks in the phone book for someone to shoot and finds him. She was a little too down on it I thought. The quote from Sandra Day O’Connor was that the end product was a “garden variety” directory, “devoid of even the slightest trace of creativity.” The case went to the Supreme Court, and it was ruled that the information in the phone book was not copyrightable. It was a phone book company found to have copied the information from another company, and the people who had initially published it sued. There was a Supreme Court case in the 1990s which I mention a couple times in the book, Feist Publications, Inc. Does the content of the phone book matter?Ī. These books are constantly being changed. Before, most telephone companies, when they distributed the books, they’d pay people – boy scouts, the homeless, whoever they could get – a certain amount of money for each book dropped off, like five cents, and less for bringing it back, maybe two cents. One of the things that separates the telephone book from other books is that the phone companies did used to collect them. There have been hundreds of cases of people storing things in the phone book – money, love letters – and then they’d have to get rid of them because the phone company would come collect the books. Errol Garner, one of my favorite jazz piano players who’s five-foot-two, used to travel with his own copy of the Manhattan white pages that he would sit on. It’s a stepping stool, it’s a booster seat. The telephone book is far more common than the family Bible ever was. Most households did have a family Bible, and though it’s not as common as people like to think, it was used in this sense. People would write important family dates in it – births, deaths, weddings. You can see something like this, though it’s not quite as true, with the family Bible in the 19th century. If everyone had an atlas in their house, it would probably have similar uses as well. What’s the purpose of the phone book – other than bulletproofing trains?Ī. Below, Shea, author of The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads, chats with Zócalo about what the phone book evokes and why it’s worth not only the paper it’s printed on, but billions of dollars. ![]() ![]() “It’s the most curiously unexamined book, especially considering that it’s the most frequently published book in the history of publishing.” And other than being a book, the phone book can be a stepping stool, a booster seat, and most inventively, in a story Shea was convinced was urban legend, bullet proofing: the perfect size for the hollow walls of railway cars wanting protection from bandits. He left aside catalogues, atlases, and encyclopedias in favor of the phone book. “I’ve been fascinated with reference materials, and why we don’t treat them as interesting books,” said Shea, author of Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. Reading books that nobody reads has become something of a specialty for Ammon Shea. ![]()
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