TELEPHONE LISTS.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 5 April 1938, Page 8

TELEPHONE LISTS.

COLOUR AS REFERENCE AID. To give quick visual indication of what is the latest half-yearly edition of the telephone directory, the Post Office adopted the plan of changing the colours of the outside cover design, alternating between red and blue, and chocolate and green combinations bn heavy manila paper. It is now going to step further with its quick-reference facilities by introducing coloured pages in some directories.

' While the four chief cities each have subscribers' lists requiring bulky volumes —the Auckland edition weighs 22 tons per issue—there are other important telephone areas where several centres are grouped. Hawke's Bay, for instance, covers Napier, Hastings, D’annevirke, and subsidiary exchanges, and a certain amount of time must have been wasted on occasion in picking up the right page for a purely local call number, as all the lists were bound together and printed on white paper. The towns were indicated in heavy black type at the tops of pages. But the Post Office hsa evolved a more effective way of r-howing the different important groupings in the district list. Each group is printed on a tinted paper. While the Napier list in the Hawke's Bay -.directory- appears on white,. Hastings entries are printed on green paper, all the Dannevirke num- | bers on salmon tinted paper, and the classified directory—covering the whole district—on yellow. A similar plan is being followed, in the grouping of the important Taranaki towns of which New Plymouth is the chief postal centre. The new plan involves more problems for the printer, but fewer for the telephone subscribers, and has been adopted by the Post Office as an improvement in reference lists which are [probably more frequently used than [any other type of directory.