Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Phone Books

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Once upon a time there were these things called phone books. Inside you could find the phone number and address of just about everyone in your town. Can you imagine?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's right. I mean, there's a slew of websites you use to research this, but, I mean, honestly, we could just say from our own brains. because there wasn't a lot in here that, like, we just didn't know as growing up in the time that we grow up again. Because this is about phone books. And if you're of a certain age, you know exactly what we're talking about. If you're not of a certain age yet, you might be surprised to know that at a certain point in time, if you wanted to, I don't know, take your car to the shop or find a florist or a dry cleaner, you couldn't just go on the Internet to do that or whip out your phone. you would bring out a 17-pound book that was 8 inches thick, drop it on your kitchen table and wake up your entire family on a Saturday morning,

and you would start letting your, well, I'm not going to say it, you would start thumbing through that thing, looking under the florist section or the laundromat section, to find a business to give your money to. Yeah. Very cute. That is how you've found businesses. It's how you found people too,

because the business part was in the second half of the phone book. It was all in yellow pages. The first part was white pages, and those were residential listings. Yeah, or they were two different books entirely. It could be if you lived in a fancy pants area, you know, like Atlanta. Like Westchester or something like that. Yeah. The white pages, this is another thing.

The reason I love doing this one, Chuck, is because this is, to me, the first time we can be like, you have grown up in a world where you can't really understand the world that this thing existed in, and shaped. This is a great example of it. And one of the things that stuck out to me was explaining the white pages where you could go and say, I'm looking for Charles W. Chuck Bryant. So I'm going to go to the bees of the white pages and start looking through the Bryant until I find all the Charles.

And I know Chuck lives in Atlanta. So I'm going to find Chuck's address in Atlanta. And then at the end of that is Chuck's phone number. And I'm going to pick up my phone and dial the numbers that is in this publicly available book. Maybe even I'll get tired of waiting for him to answer. I'll hang up and just drive to his house, which I now know exactly where it is because his address is listed under his full name with his phone number in the phone book, along

with everybody else in town. Yeah. And you would just knock on my door if you wanted to speak to me. and I know that we were sending a large number of our listeners into a complete and utter panic. Yeah. At the thought of someone knocking on their door to pop in and say hello or whatever. But just think about how much the world has changed in that respect. Oh, yeah, you don't even call someone anymore without texting them to say, can I call right now?

I know. It's very strange. It is. This is a different world. It was a totally different world. The, well, you know, another funny tangent to that is I also. remember a day where if you were like, let's say you knew someone's name, but you didn't really know where they lived and you didn't know them that well. So you needed their phone number. So you

looked it up and there were like six Josh Clarks. And you would start calling random Josh Clarks and say, are you the Josh Clark that I met at camp, summer camp this summer? Or the parents of? So like, you would go like, you know, that's the whole plot of the initial Terminator. He's killing random Sarah Connors. Oh, yeah. Because he was. looks up Sarah Connor in the phone book. Yeah. But you would totally do that. I did that too.

I mean, like you would do something like that and it was accepted. And people understood it would be like, oh, that's a different guy. Sorry. Good luck. Good luck. Oh, man, so quaint. And this was not like 300 years ago. The other thing I did not know, actually, when I said I knew all this in my brain.

And it totally makes sense now. All this, you know, the businesses themselves were advertised within the floral section or the laundromat section. and that's why you would see like A1 Plummer or A1 Florist is because they would be listed first. I never knew that and I feel like a dummy because it's so obvious. Oh, no. I mean like that's, but yeah, that's what I would call my business. We should have called this A1 Stuff You Should Know podcast. A1 podcast.

Right. Yeah. No, it totally makes sense. It was called gaming the system, I think. That's right. So for about 100 years, like this is how you made contact. with the outside world. This is how you searched for things in the outside world. It's really hard to wrap your head around now, but you just pull a book out. And I say we take a little break,

come back and talk a little more about the history of the phone book after, well, this break. Let's do it. Well, now, when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck. It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right. no shortcut for saving time, but saving money is simple. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellair direct.com. Our town is small taters by most standards, right? But to the people who grew up here, it's everything. What happens when a quiet Tennessee town becomes the front line in a battle over the future of America? Developers with right-wing

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The first phone directory we talked a little bit about in our telephone episode, I think. It was published in 1878 New Haven, Connecticut and had about 50 subscribers. That's what they were called at the time on a single piece of paper. as phones, you know, spread around. Obviously, the phone book got bigger and bigger to the point where, like I mentioned, we had a full white pages and a full yellow pages. And they were very big books. I think the last editions of the New York City, well, maybe not the last, because there are still phone books, if you have a landline, believe it or not. But the New York City phone books came in multiple volumes at the, like, last quarter of the 20th century. And they were so thick that, like, if you were a kid in high school, You might have a strong person team come around to do a little show for you at an afternoon assembly, and inevitably they would blow up a hot water bottle and burst it until it burst, and somebody would rip a phone book in half, which was seemingly really hard to do.

Okay. I do, I have no recollection of seeing an assembly like that. Like, did you see that? It sounds like that's a firsthand account. Yeah, yeah. We had a strong man team come around. and do like feats of strength for the high school one afternoon. Did they like legitimize it by just saying like also don't do drugs at the end?

Oh, probably. Yeah. Wow. That's really something. Yeah. I don't remember. I don't remember anything like that. Where'd you think they ripped up phone books just?

Like on TV. That's incredible or whatever. Yeah, exactly. I got to see it live, buddy. Wow. Go Redan H.S. That's right. The Reddand Redheads.

No, the Raiders. That's all. close. Yeah. So one of the things, like, if you were, if you had a phone, like, you just got a phone book. It was free, like they were disposable. Like, you just thought nothing of the phone book, but it turns out they were like big, big business for AT&T and then later on for a bunch of other companies. But AT&T, according to a 1986 article, the article said that AT&T made $7 billion just off of the money it charged businesses across the country to be listed in the yellow pages. And that's like $13 billion today. That's a lot. That's like lunch at Apple. Yeah. I mean, there's a ton of money.

And I even looked up, I was like, I wonder if there was a sort of a weird little hidden surcharge for like the customer to be listed. And apparently not. Apparently you were never, ever charged to be listed in the phone book. You did have to pay to get unlisted. Yeah. which a lot of states eventually like introduced like house bills and stuff, they're like, this is a scam. You can't just list somebody's name and address and say you've got to pay us to not do that. That's extortion. Yeah, so I think a lot of those ended up being successful. But, you know, AT&T was selling those not only just a spot in the Yellow Pages, but you could pay a lot more money to get like larger ads and stuff in the Yellow Pages to get more notice.

And they would market that stuff. And, you know, almost said it earlier, but I didn't want to let it slip. but a very famous one, it was in 1962. I could have sworn it was the 70s because it clearly went through the 70s. Definitely. Was let your fingers do the walking ad campaign. The idea of, hey, let your fingers do the walking instead of your body. Like don't walk around downtown looking for your florist.

Just let your fingers do that and then give them a call instead. Exactly. And I mean, that was kind of revolutionary as far as things went, at least in the mid-century. And I said that 18T made a bunch of money. off of the yellow pages. The reason why it was just them is because they had a monopoly on the phone system in the U.S.,

which I'm sure we covered as well in that phone exchange episode. But it was finally broken up. The government granted monopoly. They were like, you guys are too big. We're going to break you up into regional providers, like Northwestern Bell, Southern Bell,

that kind of stuff. And so all those companies, these sub-companies, now were printing yellow pages and they were making money. But because Bell no longer had a monopoly that also opened the door for private companies to start making their own yellow pages. There was just a lot of money walking around because this is how people found businesses.

It was either driving past and seeing a business that had their phone number on the sign, or you went to the yellow pages. It was as simple as that. So you had a lot of incentive to advertise in the yellow pages. And so companies had a lot of incentive to publish yellow pages. And so the number of phone books that came to one person's house started to boom. I think in the 1990s, in some parts of California, you might get 10 different phone books delivered to your house every year. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, obviously, especially in a place like California or, you know, Washington State, Seattle, Washington, people would be like, hey, wait a minute, this is like a pretty awful thing to do. Like the amount of waste that's happening here. I remember early, I mean,

This is a long time ago now, but not that long ago. But the Internet was around, and there were still phone books being delivered. And I remember seeing a comedian joke about, I think the joke was something about printing a small portion of the Internet and throwing it on my porch once a year. I always thought that was pretty funny. But everyone, you know, it was pretty clear, like what a wasteful thing. I think a half a billion phone books were being delivered, 650,000 tons of paper every year by 1991, enough to fill up 2 million cubic yards of landfill space. even though you could probably recycle that stuff. So they initially started doing like recycled paper and stuff like that.

Seattle, like I mentioned, I think was one of the first ones to say like, you know, we're going to start charging phone bookmakers, a 14 cents per phone book delivered within the city. And if people elect to not have a phone book, but they still throw one on your porch, like that's a $150 fine. Yeah. Knowing me, Justice Police, I would have immediately gone to the trouble of filling out like the five-page, to complain to make sure that that company got fined 150. I totally would. Yeah. I opted out.

You got a touch of the justice police in you, too, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Neither, yeah. We don't like bad guys getting away and stuff. No, justice. Yeah. So despite the environmental thing, I think basically converting to recycled paper, helped a lot of people in training people, like you said,

like these things can actually be easily recycled. That kind of simmered people down. about the environmental part. So that's not what did away with phone books. There were like three things in pretty quick succession that really started to take the yellow pages down at least. So 401, that was information. All of a sudden you could dial that for free,

starting in the 80s. And now you didn't even have to look in the phone book. You could just call up and be like, just start reading some plumber's names off to me in their phone numbers. Yeah, you would call someone to read you the phone book. Exactly, that's right. And then, of course, you know, the Internet coming along had everything to do with it. And also in 2004, Congress passed a law that said you can't put cell phone numbers and phone books.

So they were on the way to doing that. So it basically was whittled down to just landlines. And then once the Internet came around as far as businesses go, the Yellow Pages wasn't as necessary. But, you know, they're all still around because there are still landlines. you know who advertises in the Yellow Pages still? Who? Rick Sinebogan. Emily's dad and Seneca Glass, his auto glass repair shop in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, unless it's changed, we were talking one day.

And he was like, yeah, I still advertise in the Yellow Pages. A lot of people around here still use landlines still look stuff up in the Yellow Pages. Yeah, there was a poll that found, I think in 2024, more than 50 million homes in the U.S. still have a landline. And so that means that unless they go to the trouble of opting out, they still get a phone book delivered to them every year. And that 10% of all Americans still use the Yellow Pages, if you just zero in on 55 and older, almost three quarters of them use the Yellow Pages to find business. Like, old habits die hard. So if like your father-in-law is, like he has an incentive to still advertising the Yellow Pages, which means there's an incentive for Yellow Pages to still exist.

as long as people use them, you know? Yeah, what I'm really mad about is I'm now in the age group where they're like, but this is what the olds are doing. Right. Oh, yeah, yeah. Frigan yellow pages? Come on. I get that.

Nobody I know my age looks in the yellow pages, so I take issue with that number. You're a 26 percenter. Yeah, I guess so. But I have to say, if you're looking for auto glass repair in the Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio region, and you want to avoid big auto glass, go with Mom Popper, in this case the Popper, and go check out Sineco Glass. Tell Rick we sent you. Very nice, man. They do great work. I can't think of any better way for short stuff to be out. That's right. We're out.

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