Yes, specifically the business phone book. The residential one was the “white pages” -a weird book that was mysteriously left on your porch every few years where everyone’s home phone (those strange bulky ones that were attached to the wall) and home address was listed. That’s what people mean in old movies when they say “I’m in the book!” It means “You know my name, you can find my phone number if you want to call me.”
I think we got one every year actually at my old rental house. We would get a white and yellow pages. Strangely, yellow pages would shrink every year until around 2012 it was about 30 pages long.
You had to pay to be in the yellow pages, so as googling stuff became the main way to find anything, businesses that weren’t mainly patronized by old people started opting out.
Yes, specifically the business phone book. The residential one was the “white pages” -a weird book that was mysteriously left on your porch every few years where everyone’s home phone (those strange bulky ones that were attached to the wall) and home address was listed. That’s what people mean in old movies when they say “I’m in the book!” It means “You know my name, you can find my phone number if you want to call me.”
white pages would be straight up dangerous in the Internet age
You could get your number “unlisted” for an additional fee. It was still dangerous in the pre-internet age, just not to the extent that it is today.
I think we got one every year actually at my old rental house. We would get a white and yellow pages. Strangely, yellow pages would shrink every year until around 2012 it was about 30 pages long.
You had to pay to be in the yellow pages, so as googling stuff became the main way to find anything, businesses that weren’t mainly patronized by old people started opting out.