Back in the day, if you wanted to know someone’s telephone number, the best way to find it was in the phone book, or the telephone directory. These slabs of paper with tiny print were issued for your local area. So, if you were in Cornwall and wanted a number for someone or something in Scotland, the phone book was useless. That meant a call to Directory Enquiries. But, if the someone or something had applied for their name and number to be ex-directory — kept out of the phone book — you could never find out their number short of cycling up to Scotland and asking them.
When the digital age arrived, you could find out numbers by simply entering them into a search engine.
Like so many features of the Early Telephone Era — the dial, the twisty wire to play with while you chatted away at your telephone table — the phone book was suddenly, effectively, dead.
At least I thought so. Popping into the Post Office the other day, however, a remarkable new print version of this once essential publication caught my eye. “The phone book,” it announced on the cover. “We’ve changed a lot since 1880.”
This book is brought to you by BT, who certainly haven’t been around since 1880, the year after the public telephone service was introduced into the UK. Granted, an outfit called The Telephone Company did publish a book in 1880 that contained some business names — a sort of updated Kelly’s Directory — but, crucially, in an act of astonishing misrepresentation, no phone numbers.
We had to wait until 1896 for those.
The new phone book is a mixture of ads, business listings like the Yellow Pages, and those familiar teeny-tiny listings for residential numbers. It’s free to BT customers and available for a fee to those with an innate sense of curiosity. I suppose it will be useful if we wake up tomorrow morning and find that the Internet has vanished.
However, if you see one of these disappearing phone books, cherish its survival in a world now dedicated to its demise. As BT itself explains:
“In fact, we still print 18 million Phone Books every year, but with dwindling demand and the high environmental impact of printing and distributing these hard copies, we’ve decided that March 2024 will see the last books rolling off the print run.”
Once, you got a phone number assigned to your landline. It was yours as long as you lived at that address. Now that we live in MobileWorld, directories are impossible to maintain. You could change your number every week, if you so desired. And a print version of that…?
The phone book: Another thing we just had. Until we didn’t.
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