Telephone Books

I am not so sure I understand any longer why we have telephone books. At one time, the telephone book was a pretty big deal. I can remember my grandmother’s house very well growing up as a child. There was a cupboard next to the phone where she kept all the phone books. Every so often a new one would come in the mail and she would quickly replace the old one with it. It was an exciting moment for her. There were several phone books in that old cupboard. There was one for the small town where she lived. It wasn’t very big, but if you needed to call someone, well at least you had it. Problem was, sooner or later, you would need to call someone who didn’t live in town. That’s why she had a little bit bigger one for the county. I don’t think a lot of people looked at the first few pages of a telephone book, they just simply opened it and found the letter of the last name of the person they wanted to call, and that was that. But there was always a map in the first few pages. I used to love maps. I guess I wanted to go anywhere but where I was.
Now days, there doesn’t seem to be much use for telephone books. We have the internet, where we can find a phone number to anyone, anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. That doesn’t matter much, because, nobody really has a home phone they answer anymore anyways. We don’t need telephone books anymore. But we still get them. And they are bigger now than they’ve ever been. I can’t seem to figure out whose numbers are even listed in there. No one I ever try to call has a listed number. Maybe it’s unlisted, because I try and call them.
I am not sure why we don’t get a telephone book with peoples cell phone numbers listed in them. You would think that would be more practical. I still see advertisements for people to put advertisements in telephone books. I am not sure people do that anymore, but they must. I don’t think they get a lot of exposure, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t throw out the telephone book the moment they get it.
Telephone books use a lot of paper. These days you’d think we would just do away with them. We could save some trees, and some space in our grandmother’s cupboards.