FIVE VOLUMES

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 129, 5 June 1929, Page 5

FIVE VOLUMES

NEW YORK'S TELEPHONE LIST This summer the New Yorker's telephone library will be more imposing than ever before. The two-volume directory for the city proper is to be expanded to a set of five. Hereafter each of the,boroughs' is to have a volume to itself, instead of Manhattan and the Bronx sharing one and Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island another. There are now more than 1,141,000 subscribers. - The group of books has grown so large that instead of distributing a whole set, the telephone company has sent, out letters with cards for reply, asking each subscriber to choose the volumes he needs. : ' It has taken New York's, telephone book, but half a century to grow up into this .elaborate form. The first directory, dated August, 1878, was nothing but a card, or a "hanger" as it was called, from ■ the custom of hanging it on the wall beI side the telephone. It contained only 241 names, and for the most part was a classified business list., Onljr a few "downtown" offices in the financial, jobbing, and. importing districts, and a scattering of other subscribers took enoagh stock, in the two-year-old "electrical toy" to patronise it. 'Many prominent business firms of the day would have nothing to dp with it. They preferred to conduct their transactions personally or by messenger. On this first placard appeared no exchanges and no numbers, since calls were, made according to the subscribers' names. ■ A second directory was printed two"; months after the first. By this time more than 150 names had been added, and a ' sheet four feet long was necessary to accommodate them Then.a booklet appeared, and fifteen years ago this had grown to,such proportions as to be a problem/ The first attempt at solution was a new arrangement with narrower type «.nd four instead of three columnß to a pf^ cWhen its weight had increased to nearly live pounds, its pages to almost 2000, and its subscriber list to more than 800,000, the company.decided to split the volume in two. The first two-volume issue made its appearance in. the winter of 1924. Efforts have been made since then to keep the size and weight d6wn by selecting thinner and thinner paper, but even this method had its limitations. Among the more than 1,000,000 names that will appear in the first five-volume city telephone directory will be 49 that were on the original list. Oiie of these i a large ■ midtown department store, has more telephones now than the entire city of 2,000,000 population had when the first I directory was printed. It has been estimated by some fanciful person that if all the printed pages necessary to list the city's telephone subscribers were placed end to end they would reach to the moon and back three times.