Colin McEnroe Show: 'The Curious History' of the Phone Book

Phone books have gone from indispensable to pitiable in a very short span. As you will learn today, they have been used, in the past, for all sorts off odd purposes including, during World War II, coordinating the firing of artillery.

If you worked at a Connecticut daily newspaper, as I did, for two decades, you knew the importance of having, a short walk down the hall, phone books from all the towns in Connecticut and, ideally, phone books going back a few years, just in case somebody you were trying to track down changed his or her mind about being listed. For a long long time if you were in the business of trying to find somebody, for any reason, phone books were where you started .

And now the phone book is almost symbolic of people who don't get it, who don't understand that we've moved on. On our show today, meet a man who still lets his fingers do the walking now and then.

Do you still use the phone book? Do you think it's useful or a total waste of paper? Leave us your comments below, e-mail colin@wnpr.org or Tweet us @wnprcolin.