Do you like phone books?

[bandit957]

I used to be big into phone books. Around here, both the white and the yellow pages used to come out in June of each year, and I always looked forward to it. I'm not sure exactly why. I guess phone books just ruled.

When I was a teenager in the late 1980s, I had a modem that connected with the old bulletin board systems they had back then. There was one BBS that had a ranking of users with the most posts. When the new phone book came, I started posting all the entries in the phone book page by page so I would get on the list. This went on for weeks, because the sysop was on a trip to Spain.

I think one of the things that I liked was that the front part of the white pages had maps dealing with phone service. They had an area code map and a map of local phone exchanges. The yellow pages had a set of local street maps, but these maps actually were not the best or the most accurate at the time.

Our local yellow pages had drawings sprinkled throughout of a woman with a weird grin, yellow and orange hair, and a brown sweater. Did any other cities have this?

[bandit957]

Another thing like this that I liked was the Holiday Inn directories.

[Scott5114]

Not really. I did like the gigantic Feist-brand phone books we got for a while that include the white, yellow, and blue pages, as well as an assortment of maps and other similar types of reference material...but I liked that because of the maps and reference material, not the directory listings.

Phone books are one of those things that are fun to think about for the nostalgia but which are well and truly inferior to that which replaced it. I think you can still get them, but I can't fathom a use case in which it would be superior than just looking up the number on the Internet.

[Ted$8roadFan]

I do like phone books, even if they are now superfluous. There's something gratifying about looking up information in print as opposed to online, even if the latter is much easier.

[kkt]

In some ways.  If you went to a really big library that kept old ones as well as the current editions, you could follow how people and businesses moved from year to year.

[bandit957]

About 15 years ago, I noticed the library in Covington had most of the local phone books going back many years in a section for local reference materials. I don't know if they still have them. Some of the old phone books had an index that listed weird items like false body parts and stuff.

[kphoger]

I used to like phone books, back when they were two-thirds white pages, and you could amuse yourself for twenty minutes upon checking into a hotel room by finding funny names before looking up what restaurant you wanted to try out.

But, now that they're basically just yellow pages and ads, I just dump it in the bin whenever one lands on the driveway (which, upon further reflection, doesn't seem to have happened for a few years now).

[Takumi]

I've got a 1988 city directory for my area, which doubled as a phone book. It's interesting to look in it and see how the businesses have changed and when.

[Scott5114]

I used to like phone books, back when they were two-thirds white pages, and you could amuse yourself for twenty minutes upon checking into a hotel room by finding funny names before looking up what restaurant you wanted to try out.

We used to amuse ourselves at work by doing that with the customer database from time to time.

[Max Rockatansky]

They seem to have use in slightly elevating my mattress when I have nasal drainage.

[zachary_amaryllis]

I used to be big into phone books. Around here, both the white and the yellow pages used to come out in June of each year, and I always looked forward to it. I'm not sure exactly why. I guess phone books just ruled.

When I was a teenager in the late 1980s, I had a modem that connected with the old bulletin board systems they had back then. There was one BBS that had a ranking of users with the most posts. When the new phone book came, I started posting all the entries in the phone book page by page so I would get on the list. This went on for weeks, because the sysop was on a trip to Spain.

I think one of the things that I liked was that the front part of the white pages had maps dealing with phone service. They had an area code map and a map of local phone exchanges. The yellow pages had a set of local street maps, but these maps actually were not the best or the most accurate at the time.

Our local yellow pages had drawings sprinkled throughout of a woman with a weird grin, yellow and orange hair, and a brown sweater. Did any other cities have this?

Mountain Bell (later USWest, QWest, and now CenturyLink) used to always put some sort of colorado-ey picture on it's phone books.

Back in the diz-zay, I was the guy who maintained the list of 'local' prefixes for the local Fido group. I looked forward to new phone books with great anticipation, for that, and the hope that some other calling area got opened up. I remember that day, when we discovered we could call Walden, which was promptly smooshed when I realized like 20 people live in Walden, and they're not using BBS's.

The phone book nowadays is pathetic, and I get it - why let my fingers do the walking when I can just ask the phone? I live near the 4th largest city in my state, and the phone book is about the thickness of TIME magazine.

And the prefixes are .. inaccurate. The usual 'landline' prefixes are there, but with all the VOIP/cell phones/etc, there's a lot of prefixes that are 'local', but don't appear in the book.

[usends]

Mountain Bell (later USWest, Qwest, and now CenturyLink)

The first 25 years of my career were spent as a cartographer for ^those organizations: I produced and/or purchased the street maps that were printed in those telephone directories.  That was an awesome job, and I still miss it.  But during the final 10 years or so, I always used the internet myself (rather than a phone book), so it was not at all surprising when that job finally came to an end.  Anyway, all of that gives me sort of a nostalgic fondness for phone books.  When I stay in a hotel, I still open the drawer of the nightstand, and if the Gideons Bible has a phone book next to it, I can't resist checking the quality of their maps.  But very few phone books are still printing maps: too expensive, and everyone just uses online maps anyway.  In fact, it seems like an increasing number of hotels no longer even have phones in the rooms, much less phone books.

[Dirt Roads]

Phone books are one of those things that are fun to think about for the nostalgia but which are well and truly inferior to that which replaced it. I think you can still get them, but I can't fathom a use case in which it would be superior than just looking up the number on the Internet.

But the Internet is only useful when you know the name and general location of a particular business.  With an old phone book, you could look up a business category and get an entire list of businesses that wanted to compete for your project.  In general, you could tell who the professionals were; who the little guys were; who the wannabees were; and who the schmoozers were.  In the Internet age, we've had very limited success dealing with businesses that we found on the Internet, even when looking up references and comments.  So when it comes to crunch time, I'll snoop around the Internet for a while but usually end up finding somebody in the [really, really old] phone book or just doing the work myself when the search gets too long.

[triplemultiplex]

Phone books used to have maps in them so yeah I was a little interested.  They were always shitty maps, but still it was interesting to me to look at them as a kid.  More than once as a teen, I drew in corrections to a phone book map in, say, a hotel room or a reception area of some kind of office.  I certainly fixed up our copies of the regional phone book that showed up at our house every year.  I recall adding a lot of I-39 shields to those phone book maps because they took a long time to get with the program on that route.

[frankenroad]

Phone books used to have maps in them so yeah I was a little interested.  They were always shitty maps, but still it was interesting to me to look at them as a kid.  More than once as a teen, I drew in corrections to a phone book map in, say, a hotel room or a reception area of some kind of office.  I certainly fixed up our copies of the regional phone book that showed up at our house every year.  I recall adding a lot of I-39 shields to those phone book maps because they took a long time to get with the program on that route.

Not sure where you were, but the maps in the Cincinnati phone book were actually some of the best paper maps available back in  the 1990s and early 2000s.

[bandit957]

Not sure where you were, but the maps in the Cincinnati phone book were actually some of the best paper maps available back in  the 1990s and early 2000s.

They were probably pretty good then. But I remember in the 1980s they were just gray lines and had a lot of errors.

[Big John]

The Green Bay phone book always had the short-lived STH 119 in it long after ir was decommissioned and even after it was re-assigned to Milwaukee.

[skluth]

The Green Bay phone book always had the short-lived STH 119 in it long after ir was decommissioned and even after it was re-assigned to Milwaukee.

At least the Green Bay phone book had decent city maps of Green Bay and DePere.

[hbelkins]

Navin Johnson sure liked the phone book.

So did the guy who picked his name out of the phone book as the person to shoot at.

[Rothman]

Navin Johnson sure liked the phone book.

So did the guy who picked his name out of the phone book as the person to shoot at.

Well, if it happened in a comedic movie, it must have been a risk to all of us.

That guy couldn't shoot worth a darn.

[bing101]

I remember Pacific Bell Phone books when I was a kid it was the search engine of their era.

[hbelkins]

Navin Johnson sure liked the phone book.

So did the guy who picked his name out of the phone book as the person to shoot at.

Well, if it happened in a comedic movie, it must have been a risk to all of us.

That guy couldn't shoot worth a darn.

In an ironic turn of fate, "The Jerk" was on TV this afternoon. I hadn't seen it in awhile.

[epzik8]

I did, when they were actually useful.

[frankenroad]

Another phone book geek here.  In the late 60s and early 70s, I would eagerly await the new phone books every June to see what new prefixes had been added in the metro area, as well as what prefixes had added touch-tone service (there was a separate list of those in the ad encouraging people to switch).  At one time, I had quite the collection of phone books from various places around the country.

It was not unusual back in the day for people who lived in larger metro areas to use phone books as booster seats for kids at the kitchen or dining room table.  I remember in college once making a joke about that, and the person who I was talking to didn't get it.  Turned out they were from a small town where the phone book was less than 1/2 inch thick.

[abefroman329]

Navin Johnson sure liked the phone book.

So did the guy who picked his name out of the phone book as the person to shoot at.

Well, if it happened in a comedic movie, it must have been a risk to all of us.

That guy couldn't shoot worth a darn.

In an ironic turn of fate, "The Jerk" was on TV this afternoon. I hadn't seen it in awhile.

Like many Gen-Xers, I was surprised to learn that the dog was actually named Shithead and not Stupid, since, until I was probably in my early 20s, I'd only seen the edited-for-television version.

Anyway, the guy wasn't trying to shoot Navin, he just really hated cans of motor oil.  Or were the cans defective?