phone book.jpg This week marked the anniversary of that solemn
tome, that august undertaking, the telephone book, in honor of
which the Saturday Evening Post has run a fascinating and
whimsical piece by Jeff Nillson. The article, which takes much
of its material from a 1954 piece in the Post, calls itself a
retrospective, but reads like an obituary. It’s filled with
juicy stories: from looking at the two pieces together, we learn
that before there were star maps, there were peddlers hawking
the numbers of stars along Wilshire Boulevard. In the days when
people put money in box springs rather than banks, one
shopkeeper spent three days searching seventy-five thousand
phone books for money he’d left inside.  But before we consign
the phone book to history—primarily useful for footstools,
booster seats, and Internet pranks—it’s useful to remember the
ways that these directories prefigured their more modern
replacements. They were, in essence, the first social-media
sites, and exploded in a similar manner. Though