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The phone book in my country didn't have ads (well, except for descriptions of the phone company's services). It was just paid by the subscriptions. There was o
by wkat4242 2y ago
The phone book in my country didn't have ads (well, except for descriptions of the phone company's services). It was just paid by the subscriptions. There was only one state owned phone company.
- eesmith 2y agoHere's an example of a US phone book from the 1980s, https://archive.org/details/1981-12-mc-lean-county-phone-book/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/1981-12-mc-lean-county-phone-boo... . It has two sections, typically called 'white pages' and 'yellow pages' because the paper for the latter was tinted yellow. The white pages had subscriber phone numbers, listed alphabetically, with no advertising except that one could pay extra to have the entry in bold, to grab attention. The yellow pages were for business numbers, arranged by topic. A business could buy ad space to put on the same page as the topic. In the linked-to example, the white and yellow pages were in the same book. In a more populated area, the two would be separate books, and in larger cities even two books for the white pages and one for the yellow.
- wkat4242 2y agoAh yeah for us they were always different, and by different publishers too. The funny thing was that the yellow pages used to be printed on yellow paper but they switched to white with a lot of yellow printing ink because some advertisers wanted to use white in their ads :) The yellow pages used to be called "the golden guide" here.