The Book Everyone Had

Alissa Grosso

Mar 13, 2024

Recently online I saw someone sharing a photo of a vintage newspaper clipping that showed a “man in the street” type of interview, and while the opinions of these men in the street did seem somewhat dated, what really struck them about the published piece was not only did it give the names of the different interviewees, but also their home addresses. It was something that by today’s standards seems strange, but really was perfectly normal back in the day.

Perhaps part of the reason this was seen as normal was because every household had all this information at their disposal already in a handy book that everyone owned. This wealth of information was delivered for free to our doorstep each year. I’m talking of course about the phone book.

On the hunt for a North Hudson County phone book from 1999? Good news you can grab one for the low price of $200 !? At least that’s what one seller is trying to sell this sweet gem of a book for on Abe Books. Yikes!

For those too young to remember phone books, these handy dandy reference books usually had two sections, the white pages and the yellow pages. In the white pages section of the phone book you could look up the phone number and home address of anyone who lived in your area. (When I was a kid I think our phone book just covered the county we lived in, but if you lived in a less-populated area it might cover multiple counties.) So, if you wanted to call up some friend of yours from school, whose number you didn’t know you just needed to look up their last name in the white pages. If they had a very common last name like Smith or Jones, then it was also helpful to know their Dad’s first name since usually this was whose name would be on the listing.

Of course, if you were a very private person, you could pay an extra fee to the phone company for an unlisted number, in which case your information would not appear in the phone book. This was something my grandparents did, because my grandmother preferred her privacy. So, imagine her shock when one afternoon she turned on the television and saw her phone number displayed on the local access channel under the heading “Seniors, Call Nick for Tax Help.” Through the AARP my grandfather had been volunteering to help senior citizens with their tax prep, but my grandmother never expected to have her phone number blasted out on the television. Let’s just say grandpa got a very angry call at the real estate office where he worked that afternoon.

At my other grandparents’ house the phone book had a secondary use. When my sister and I were small, the fat phone book (they used to be about the size of a decent dictionary) was put in use as a child booster seat during family dinners. Younger readers wondering how adults could have possibly thought this was a sensible idea, need to understand that childhood safety was a concept that hadn’t really taken hold yet.

I feel like phone books have nearly gone extinct. It’s been several years since we received one here, but that could be because it’s also been several years since this house has had an active landline. The most current phone book we have is so thin and anemic it's nearly unrecognizable. This is a shame because I feel like the yellow pages section of the phone book was a far superior research tool than the internet when it came to finding a local business or contractor. I think older readers will agree when you need a plumber it’s a whole lot easier to flip to the plumber section of the yellow pages than it is to resort to Googling and trying to wade through all the useless results that come up to try to find a local plumber.

Well, I guess it’s proof that despite all the technological advances, books continue to be pretty useful technology, especially that one that every house used to have.

— Alissa