Saturday, May 16, 2020

Just Look in the Phone Book

I've been using this nifty 1951 telephone book card / calendar for a few years now as a bookmark, and looking at it again and thinking about how weird the idea of a big floppy book filled with thousands of phone numbers and ads really is in our current modern way of living. In fact, just yesterday I found the new phone book wrapped in plastic, and lying at the end of my driveway, the pitiful 2020 edition still struggling to be relevant, and definitely struggling to reach even 100 pages long anymore. In the age of nearly all information instantly available at your fingertips via smartphone, does anyone really still use a phone book? I honestly don't think I've cracked one out of the plastic wrapping in over a decade, though I do have some from the 70's still because they're full of great advertising art and memories of fave childhood business long gone. (I even did a post about it in 2010, just CLICK HERE for it!) So, in the meantime, enjoy the attractive girl art on this card, she's looking tempted to call information-- but no, she's letting her fingers do the walking instead!



3 comments:

Mr. Cavin said...

I haven't had a house in the US since 2005. At that time, I was still receiving two phone books every year simply because I still had a land line for my computer modem. I'd abandoned regular telephones for mobile phones at the turn of the century, but cable internet was still a more expensive package than a T2 line. So I technically had a "phone" and so I got the books without fail. They stacked up. But for years by that point, all I'd use them for was target practice. I'm not sure they make a gun that can shoot all the way through one. And it's easy to retrieve your bullets just by fanning the pages.

Wendy said...

Lol, I used the phone book just last week, I have a landline (no cell either), AND I still have a rotary dial phone. (And I'm not even 35 yet--some of us are just born old, I guess!) Also, such a gorgeous illustration!

Brian Barnes said...

No, screw you phone company, flipping through a book isn't going to stop my soul crushing loneliness! I'm calling the operator for human interaction!