The death of the telephone book

Telephone book trash pile, originally uploaded by trexfiles23.

A couple weeks ago I used a photo of the first telephone book--well, page--to illustrate how a Christian minister helped pave the way for all night sex chat lines. The photo above points to the end of the line for the phone book as a mass medium.

Years ago, the latest Manhattan telephone book was something you wanted to grab the day it arrived in the building before all the copies disappeared. This year, my super informed me, not a single copy was taken from the stack despite a week in the lobby. Last night they were sent down to the trash.