What an excellent, fun, interesting read! So interesting, that I absorbed all the minutiae with relish and can probably spit it all back out, most preferably during a winning performance of Jeopardy!. Shea does spend about a quarter of the book detailing the history of the phone, which is necessary, but not at that length. Perhaps he wanted padding to get to 200 pages, but the book would have had more substance had it been more concise. Also very, very surprising is his odd sentence structure, which very often flouts popular grammatical conventions, including ending several sentences with propositions. Tsk tsk. I did reach for the dictionary quite often, however, which I enjoy immensely when reading, but the word "putative" has now reached overkill. It's in every new book I read. Enough. ( )

Shea's written an interesting, quirky tale about what on the face of it is a decidedly uninteresting book. ( )

Shea Ammon’s “The phone book: the curious history of the book that everyone uses but no one reads” is an entertaining little book. However, it is not a history of the phone book. At best it is a collection of antecedents and musings that are at best tangentially connected to the telephone book. Ammon rambles on, in a light and humorous style, about such varied topics as the origin of the word “telephone” and the enjoyment of smelling books.

I did enjoy reading Ammon’s book although it was also a disappointment. I was hoping for some solid information on the origins of the published telephone directory. I was hoping for more information than three competing claims for the first published directory and a few pages about the phone books predecessor, the city directory. Even when musing about the missing headings for Bells and Whistles in modern yellow pages Ammon overlooks the relatively recent division of the Yellow Pages into two complimentary books, the Consumer Yellow Pages and the Business-to-Business Yellow Pages. The missing bell and whistle manufacturers likely located there.

If you are simply interested in entertainment the book is worthwhile. If you are looking for information try the Yellow Pages. ( )

Ammon Shea manages to make an incredibly interesting subject rife with possibility into a self-indulgent waste of time. Luckily, the book is short. I found this in the remainders section of a Borders before it went out of business. Now I know why it was there. Stay away, unless your thesis is on the telephone company. ( )

Fresh off reading the Oxford English Dictionary for pleasure, Ammon Shea tackles the common phone book. Along the way, he finds a cast of characters both within and without. His readings of both historic and current telephone directories show how the world was and is, how it is changing and evolving. He finds a phone book from the area where he grew up and begins to reminisce about all the people and places of his childhood. He also meets a number of phone book collectors, from a lawyer using them for private investigation work to regular collectors who cannot bear to see them destroyed or recycled. After reading, one might almost be swayed to view the white/yellow pages as an actual necessity and not a paperweight. A fun read. ( )