Telephone Book Links

Archives

• The Library of Congress has this guide to searching its collection for telephone books.
• BT Archives maintains an archive of telecommunication-related material for the United Kingdom, including historical telephone books. This collection is also described on a Web page of the Telecommunications Heritage Group.
• Telecommunications History Group has an archive of historical materials, mainly related to the telephone company now known as U S West. There is a link to a page intended to list their telephone books, but it was under construction when I visited it. They are said to have nearly 11,000 telephone directories published between 1890 to 1992.
• The Phone Book Library (currently under construction), in Adelaide, South Australia, is a collection of Australia, New Zealand, and Pacific phone books. It also has a useful Links page.
• The Museum of Independent Telephony has some old phone books in its collection.
• Tacoma Pioneer Telephone Museum has some vintage phone books.
• Kansas State Historical Society says it will list its holdings of old Kansas phone books.
• The Guildhall Library in London offers a PDF leaflet describing its collection of trade directories and telephone books, with informative sidelights.
• Telephone Pioneer Museum of New Mexico has old New Mexico phone books, and may sell duplicates.
• Fundación Telefónica, of Spain, has some old phone books in its historical exhibit.
• The Utah State Historical Society has this catalogue of its collection of Utah phone books (Adobe Acrobat format).
• A genealogist has some old Kansas phone books.
• Some genealogy sites have posted facsimiles of old telephone books.
• San Francisco Genealogy has transcriptions or facsimiles of several old San Francisco books, including the 1878 issue, said to be the second telephone directory published in the United States.
• Barrington, IL telephone books from 1908-1926.
• 1915 Kearney, NE telephone book.
• 1954 and 1958 Canning, NS telephone books.
• The following libraries and societies have lists of their holdings:
• Santa Cruz Public Library has a searchable index of California telephone books
• Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado
• Indiana Directories Research Service
• Pittsburg (Kansas) State Univ.
• Boston University's collection of African phone books
• Iron Range Research Center, Chisholm, Minnesota
• Nebraska State Historical Society
• Port Washington, Long Island, New York
• New York State Library
• North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina
• Olivia Raney Library, Raleigh, North Carolina
• Tennessee State Library and Archives lists its telephone book holdings
• Texas State Library
• Texas Tech University
• Wyoming State Archives
• Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada catalogue of holdings (use Acrobat search function and search for "TELEPHONE")
• Telephone Museum of Prince Edward Island has transcribed several old PEI telephone books
• Holger Pedersen has posted a list (in Danish) of old telephone books from Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands, telling where they can be found in libraries and collections.

For Sale

• Phone books for sale on the oldtelephonebooks.com site - wide variety.
• Advice for dealers.
• eBay's listings of phone books for sale might be here, or here, or here. Caution: some eBay listings look like telephone books for sale, but what is really being offered is a CD-ROM with a pdf file of the contents of the book.
• On eBay, I wrote a market guide to buying and selling telephone books.
• The Phone Book Library sells telephone directories for some Pacific islands.
• GoGoMag is selling some Kansas and D.C. area telephone books.
• This eBay store sometimes has telephone books for sale.
• Antique Telephones etc. for sale had some telephone books for sale when I visited their site.
• Phoneco inc.'s printed catalog lists a number of old telephone books, primarily Chicago area. Their Web site doesn't seem to mention them, but you can always send an inquiry.
• The Phoneman briefly mentions phone books for sale.
• The Directory Source is Qwest's way to let you order current telephone directories, among other things, from all over the world.
• The Directory Store is Verizon's directory ordering mechanism.

Other Ways of Finding Old Phone Books

• Cyndi's List is probably the foremost genealogy Web site. This page discusses finding city directories and phone directories for genealogical research. (Scroll down the page, or click on a heading under "Category Index".)
• Ancestry.com's columnist compares the merits of city directories and telephone directories for genealogy.
• Tribute to the Telephone has some hints on finding old telephone books.

Incunabula

• BT seems to think that London's was the first telephone directory. Compare it to New Haven's, also shown on this AT&T page.
• San Francisco claims the second telephone book in the United States.
• Less than a year after New Haven's first, the first telephone book that was actually a book came out in Connecticut. A copy sold at auction for $170,500 in 2008.
• Whitepages online mounted a traveling exhibition to celebrate the quasquicentennial (125th anniversary) of the first Australian telephone book (Melbourne 1880). The Phone Book Library has better images of it.
• The NTT Digital Museum has a brief history of the Japanese telephone book.

The Art of the Phone Book

• The allegorical figure on the cover of so many Bell System telephone books of the 1940s and 1950s is the "Spirit of Communication", more informally known as "Golden Boy". The Dallas Morning News tells where the original statue ended up.
• Jonathan VanDyke used 80 Tallahassee telephone books for his installation.
• Hans Winkler uses telephone books in his conceptual art, reviewed in zingmagazine.
• Telephone book as a work of art.
• The Center for Book Arts has an exhibit called "The Altered Page". Note: Chirurgie esthétique is French for plastic surgery.
• Christian Boltanski displayed 3,000 telephone books as art.
• Robert Zahornicky displayed 2,150 telephone books as art.
• Jan Svenungsson created the cover of the 1992 Växjö telephone book.
• Telecom New Zealand runs a contest to design its white pages telephone book covers.
• American Samoa explains its telephone book cover.
• Telstra, the Australian telephone company, displays its white pages cover photos for 2001, 2002, and 2004.
• Telephone Book Varieties (part of our Web site) shows some peculiarities of cover art.

Phone Books in the News

• The folks in Sewickley, PA weren't altogether pleased when the town was suddenly given its own Verizon directory, separate from the Pittsburgh telephone book.
• The India TEX Users Group has an article about the technology used to print the telephone book for Trivandrum, Kerala.
• The Des Moines Register has an article about the city's first phonebook, which was privately compiled and published by a pharmacist.
• Atlanta Business Chronicle has an article about saving paper for Atlanta-area phone books.
• Granma, the Cuban newspaper, tells about the new Cuban yellow pages. (In Portuguese, under the heading "PÁGINAS AMARELAS")
• The ITU (International Telecommunications Union) has published a recommendation for a standard way to write international telephone numbers, among other things. Click on "Summary" to see a tantalizing hint that this might affect printed telephone directories.
• Here's an article about a public reading of poetry from, supposedly, the first telephone book to feature poetry.
• Picture of a North Suburban Boston 1977 telephone book that was recalled because of a controversy. That story reminds me that in the Los Angeles area, as the 1984 Olympics were approaching, some telephone books were printed with an unauthorized use of Olympics logos. Pacific Telephone had to print new covers and paste them over as many of the offending covers as they could find.

Telecom Companies and Publishers Speak for Themselves

• Moscow City Telephone Network tells some of the history of the Moscow phone book.
• THS prints Latin American phone books.
• Eniro is a Swedish firm.
• Fonecta talks about Finnish books.
• Phone Directories Company publishes privately issued telephone books, mostly for western North America.
• SEAT is a longtime publisher of Italian classified directories.
• VNU is a leading private publisher of telephone books in Europe.
• French speakers have looked up telephone numbers in "le bottin" for ages. The name honors Sébastien Bottin (biography in French), a 19th-century publisher of French commercial directories.
• Click on the Maps link (lower right) on the Telecom New Zealand for a pop-up window showing coverage areas.
• Directories is the name of a Swiss publisher of telephone books. They have a map of Swiss telephone books, and other more ephemeral information, on their site.
• DeTeMedien, part of the German telephone company, gives a few facts about its directories. (If an error-message-looking window pops up, click "Cancel".) Their home page is in German.
• Directories Philippines Corporation has a wealth of information about Philippine telephone books.
• R.H. Donnelley is perhaps the oldest publisher of classified telephone directories.
• SingTel (Singapore) offers its own and other area telephone books for sale.
• AT&T presents its yellow page directories.
• Puerto Rico Telephone Company talks about its earliest phone books in its company time line. (In Spanish)
• The Yellow Pages Integrated Media Association has a beginner's guide to telephone directories, from the publisher's viewpoint.

Miscellaneous

• As a telephone book collector, I never thought about turning down the ones delivered to my home. Here's a blog entry from someone who did.
• Wistful Vista Telephone Co. sells fully functional vintage telephones.
• The Telephone EXchange Name Project has a database that is supposed to let you find the old letter combinations that were dialed until the 1960s. It doesn't work for me, though. Another enthusiast is constructing his own version of the database at A Historical Site.
• Can you get a random sample of the population by picking numbers from a telephone book? Some researchers in New Zealand investigated. Here is an abstract of their paper; you can read the whole paper if you register (for free).
• British Telecom tells about unlisted numbers (ex directory).
• About.com has a few facts about telephone book history. (Warning: you will probably get pop-up ads along with your facts.)
• Timeline of the history of Japanese telephone books is an exhibit in the NTT Digital Museum.
• Adobe Type Library's articles about the Bell Gothic and Bell Centennial fonts mention some points in the development of typefaces for telephone directories.
• Poetry in the Yellow Pages.
• Phone Books of Slovakia mapped.
• Seattle, WA 1962 cover picture.

Last updated: April 10, 2010

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