Short Stuff: Phone Books

Summary

Stuff You Should Know — Short Stuff: Phone Books (August 5, 2026)

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Episode Overview

In this Short Stuff episode, hosts Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant delve into the nostalgic and increasingly obsolete world of phone books. They discuss the evolution, function, cultural impact, rapid decline, and enduring quirks of the phone book, from its heyday as a household necessity to its near disappearance in the digital age. Along the way, the conversation is peppered with anecdotes, observations on changing social norms, and a few memorable jokes about generational shifts.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Pre-Internet Necessity of Phone Books

• (01:29–02:30) Josh and Chuck reflect on how, for much of the 20th century, finding a business or person's contact information required a literal, hefty book:
  • “You would bring out a 17-pound book that was eight inches thick, drop it on your kitchen table, and wake up your entire family on a Saturday morning…” — Josh Clark (01:50)
• The book was divided into white pages (residential listings) and yellow pages (businesses), or in larger towns, were separate volumes (02:45).

How Phone Books Shaped Social Behavior

• (02:50–04:21) The hosts stress that phone books offered both names and home addresses, enabling direct contact or even unexpected house visits — a concept that feels almost alien in today’s society:
  • “At the end of that [entry] is Chuck's phone number. And I'm going to pick up my phone and dial… Maybe even… drive to his house, which I now know exactly where it is, because his address is listed under his full name.” — Josh Clark (03:37)
• The idea of unsolicited calls or drop-ins contrasts starkly with modern etiquette:
  • “You don't even call someone anymore without texting them to say, can I call right now?” — Josh Clark (04:13)
• The phone book doubled as a proto-social network, albeit with hilarious pitfalls:
  • “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 this summer?'” — Josh Clark (04:21)
  • Referencing the plot of The Terminator where the antagonist checks the phone book, killing all the Sarah Connors listed (05:00).

Business and the Art of “Gaming” the System

• (05:13–05:47) The hosts reveal that business names often started with “A1” or similar to get top billing in directories — a simple but effective hack:
  • “That’s why you would see, like, a One Plumber or a One Florist, because they would be listed first. I never knew that.” — Josh Clark (05:13)

Historical Context and Cultural Phenomena

• (08:49–10:26) The first phone directory appeared in 1878 (New Haven, CT) and grew to the massive tomes of the late 20th century.
• Josh recalls assemblies featuring strongmen who “would rip a phone book in half,” a once-common demonstration of strength (09:46):
  • “We had a strongman team come around and do, like, feats of strength…” — Josh Clark (10:00)

Economic Impact of Phone Books

• (10:35–11:41) Phone books were “big business”:
  • In 1986, AT&T made $7 billion (equivalent to $13 billion today) from charging businesses for listings in the Yellow Pages (10:35).
  • Residential listings were free, but customers did have to pay to be unlisted (11:15).
  • Some states eventually prohibited charging to stay unlisted, calling it “extortion” (11:42).

Decline of the Phone Book

• (12:22–17:29) Several factors led to the Yellow Pages’ decline:
  1. Monopoly Break-Up: AT&T lost its exclusive grip, leading to a flood of competing directories (13:00).
  2. Over-Saturation and Environmental Backlash: Multiple phone books per household; by 1991, half a billion books used 650,000 tons of paper annually (13:45).
     • “Printing a small portion of the Internet and throwing it on my porch once a year.” — Comedian’s joke referenced by Josh Clark (13:56).
     • Seattle began charging per book delivered and fined unwanted deliveries to combat waste (14:34).
  3. Technological Advancements:
     • The rise of 411 for phone-based information (15:15).
     • The Internet rendering print directories largely obsolete (16:00).
     • In 2004, a law prohibited listing cell phone numbers in directories (16:08).

Persistence and Demographics of Use Today

• (16:31–18:06) Despite waning prevalence, phone books do linger:
  • Over 50 million US homes still have a landline, and 10% of Americans still use the Yellow Pages — rising to nearly 75% for those over 55 (16:50).
  • “Old habits die hard,” and so advertising in the Yellow Pages can still make sense for certain local businesses.
• Josh jokes, “I'm now in the age group where they're like, 'But this is what the olds are doing, right? Friggin Yellow Pages,'” (17:29) but insists, “nobody I know my age looks in the yellow Pages” (17:36).
• Personal anecdote: Emily’s dad, Rick (Seneco Glass, Cuyahoga Falls, OH), still advertises in the Yellow Pages, and Josh encourages listeners to support local business (16:32; 17:46).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On societal change:
  “Just think about how much the world has changed in that respect.” — Chuck Bryant (04:08)
  “It was a totally different world.” — Josh Clark (04:21)

• On business listings:
  “That’s why you would see, like, a One Plumber… They would be listed first. I never knew that.” — Josh Clark (05:13)

• On environmental impact:
  “Printing a small portion of the Internet and throwing it on my porch once a year.” — Josh Clark, quoting a comedian (13:56)

• On generational shifts:
  “I'm now in the age group where they're like, 'But this is what the olds are doing, right? Friggin Yellow Pages.'” — Josh Clark (17:29)

• Heartfelt shoutout:
  “If you’re looking for auto glass repair in the Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio region… go check out Seneco Glass. Tell Rick we sent you.” — Josh Clark (17:46)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:29 — Introductions and why phone books matter to certain generations
• 02:30 — White pages vs. yellow pages explained
• 03:37 — Personal information and etiquette in the phone book era
• 04:13 — Modern norms vs. past practices
• 05:13 — A1 business name trick and why businesses did it
• 08:49 — The origin (first phone directory, 1878)
• 10:35 — Economic scale: $7 billion annual business
• 13:45 — Multiple directories, environmental impact
• 14:34 — Seattle’s fines for unwanted book delivery
• 15:15–16:08 — The roles of 411, the Internet, and laws around cell numbers
• 16:50 — Stats on lingering landlines and usage
• 17:46 — Local business still advertising; the “olds” debate

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Podcast Tone & Language

Josh and Chuck’s tone is informal, nostalgic, humorous, and relatable, especially for anyone who remembers the analog era of directories. Their camaraderie and ability to riff on generational divides make the episode engaging and light-hearted, delivering substantial information alongside wry observations about how much everyday life has changed.

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Summary Takeaway:
The episode offers a warm and witty look back at a seemingly mundane object that once shaped how we connected with our world, while highlighting the speed and depth of technological and social change over just a few decades.

Transcript

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. Josh, Chuck, Cherry, Dave, let's go. Nostalgic.

[Josh Clark]

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 grew 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 eight 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, it's Very cute.

[Chuck Bryant]

That is how you 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Or they were two different books entirely.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 shape. This is a great example of it. And one of the things that stuck out to me was explaining the white pages were where you could go and say, I'm looking for Charles W. Chuck Bryant. So I'm going to go to the Bs of the white pages and start looking through the Bryants 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.

[Josh Clark]

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 at the thought of someone knocking on their door just to pop in and say hello or whatever.

[Chuck Bryant]

But just think about how much the world has changed in that respect.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah. You don't even call someone anymore without texting them to say, can I call right now?

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Josh Clark]

It's very strange.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is. This is a different world.

[Josh Clark]

It was a totally different world. Well, you know, another funny tangent to that is I also remember a day where if you were like, let's say, 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 is he's killing random Sarah Connors. Oh, yeah, because he looks up Sarah Connor in the phone book.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but you would totally do that. I did that, too. I mean, like, you would do something like that. And it was.

[Josh Clark]

And people understood him and be like, oh, that's a different guy. Sorry.

[Chuck Bryant]

Good luck.

[Josh Clark]

Good luck.

[Podcast Announcer]

Oh, man.

[Josh Clark]

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, a one plumber or a one florist is because they would be listed first. I never knew that. And I feel like a dummy because it's so obvious.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, no. I mean, like, that's. But, yeah, that's what I would call my business. We should have called this A one stuff you should know podcast.

[Josh Clark]

A one podcast, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

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[Ari Chambers]

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[Sam J]

Hey, what's up, y'?

[Josh Clark]

All?

[Sam J]

It's your girl, Sam J.

[Ari Chambers]

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Well, I thought he was gonna write. I thought you were all gonna write a song.

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Listen to Podlandia. AO rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your pod.

[Josh Clark]

All right, we're back. We're talking phone books. The first phone directory we talked a little bit about in our telephone episode. I think it was published in 1878 in New Haven, Connecticut, and had about 50 subscribers, is what they were called at the time on a single piece of paper listed as phones 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. Cause 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 last quarter of the 20th century. And they were so thick that 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 till it burst. And they would. Somebody would rip a phone book in Half. Which was seemingly really hard to do.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay. I do. I have no recollection of seeing an assembly like that. Like, did you see that? It sounds like. Oh, yeah, that's a firsthand account.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Yeah. We had a strong strongman team come around and do, like, feats of strength for the high school one afternoon.

[Chuck Bryant]

Did they, like, legitimize it by just saying, like, also, don't do drugs at the end?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, probably, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow, that's really something. Yeah. I don't remember we. I don't remember anything like that.

[Josh Clark]

Where do you think they ripped up phone books?

[Chuck Bryant]

Just, like, on tv.

[Josh Clark]

That's incredible.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or whatever. Yeah, exactly.

[Josh Clark]

I got to see it live, buddy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow. Go Redan hs.

[Josh Clark]

That's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

The Redan Redheads.

[Josh Clark]

No, the Raiders. That's all right.

[Chuck Bryant]

That was close.

[Martha Stewart]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Which a lot of states eventually, like, introduce, like, house bills and stuff. They were like, this is a scam. You can't just list somebody's name and address and say, you got to pay us to not do that.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's extortion.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So I think a lot of those ended up being successful. But, you know, AT and T was. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly. And I mean, that was kind of revolutionary as far as things went, at least in the mid century. And I said that AT&T made a bunch of money off of the Yellow Pages. The reason why it was just them is cause they had a monopoly on the phone system in the US 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 gonna break you up into regional providers like Northwestern Bell, Southern Bell, that kind of stuff. And so all of 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.

[Josh Clark]

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, 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 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 $0.14 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Knowing me, Justice Police, I would have immediately gone to the trouble of filling out like the five page form to complain to make sure that that company got fined.

[Josh Clark]

I totally would. Yeah, I opted out.

[Chuck Bryant]

You got a touch of the justice policing? YouTube? Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah. Neither. Yeah. We don't like bad guys getting away with stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Justice. So despite the environmental thing, I think basically converting to recycled paper helped a lot of people in training people. Like you said, 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 411, 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 plumbers names off to me and their phone numbers.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you would call someone to read you the phone number.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly. That's right.

[Josh Clark]

And then of course, 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 in 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 they're all still around because there are still landlines. And you know who advertises in the Yellow Pages still?

[Sam J]

Who?

[Josh Clark]

Rick Zinnebogen, Emily's dad in 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. There was a poll that found, I think in 2024, more than 50 million homes in the US still have a landline. 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's like, he has an incentive to still advertise in the yellow Pages, which means there's an incentive for yellow pages to still exist as long as people use them, you know?

[Josh Clark]

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? Friggin Yellow Pages, come on. I get that nobody I know my age looks in the yellow Pages, so I take issue with that number.

[Chuck Bryant]

You're a 26 percenter.

[Josh Clark]

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 and pop. Or in this case, the Pop and go check out Seneco Glass. Tell Rick we sent you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Very nice, man.

[Josh Clark]

They do great work.

[Chuck Bryant]

I can't think of any better way for short stuff to be out.

[Josh Clark]

That's right, we're out.

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