I Found Them in the Yellow Pages
Farber
1973
Submitter: Why is this awful? First, yellow pages – does anyone under 45 know what they are? Second, only males have professional occupations. Third, the florist appears to be a predator. There are so many reasons this alphabet book needs to be weeded. [Found in a community college library.]
Holly: My library still has a collection of current yellow pages, and they are asked for by patrons maybe once or twice a month. It’s not a very big (Michigan only) collection, and it isn’t heavily used, but we do still have them. It is definitely older folks who ask for them most often. That said, this submitted book is completely irrelevant and outdated. Since it is meant for children, it is even more useless. Submitter is right – do kids even know what yellow pages are? You can definitely weed it without anyone noticing it’s gone.
I’m 44, and I know what the yellow pages are. 🙂
41 here and absolutely know what they are and even used them back in the day.
I still get some delivered annually at my house! I would opt out, but you have to give them all sorts of personal info to do so, and I hate that. I like my anonymity.
36 here and I remember using yellow & white pages (& the latter is the “creepy one” that list individual numbers & addresses, my parents opted out of that one fast!)
Also, Yellow pages are still fairly popular among non-English speakers – who are not as adept at web searching & prefer to patronize businesses where someone can speak their primary language.
There is so much that’s weird about this book, even for its time, but I can scarcely get past the cover: Why is the phone receiver so giant? (Makes it even more puzzling for modern kids who might not know what it is.) And why the giant paw of something sneaking up on the kid? I was sure this was going to be a cautionary book about not talking to strangers on the phone.
It was illustrated by Marc Brown, the creator of Arthur! Not a good reason to keep it but interesting to see how far back his artwork goes.
According to the cover “IT” found that kid thru the yellow pages…
Hopefully the kid is on the phone with emergency services but they’d better hurry lol!!!
Oh for the days when men could wear floral hot pants.
“Hey kid, d’ya wanna come touch my dangling yoyo?”
It looks to me as if it were a rather clever little book. The florist is surrounded by flowers and ferns. The yoga guy has a yo-yo, and his body forms a “Y.” I’d love to see the other letters.
Make a new book with careers instead of yellow pages and brighten up the colors, and you might have a winner.
I’m 23 and people my age do know what Yellow Pages are.
When I was a teenager I once read a joke about a kingdom that was stricken by a plague, and the only cure was guarded in the forest by a horrible creature called the Yellow Fingers. After all of his knights were either killed by the monster or had fled from the kingdom in fear, one of the king’s page boys said he would go get the cure, and to the king’s amazement, he succeeded. When the king asked how the page managed to get past the Yellow Fingers when everyone else who tried had failed, the boy said, “Next time let your pages do the walking through the Yellow Fingers.”
Too bad only people in their 40s at least will probably get the reference now.
“A predator? Baseless slander, I say. I am a simple, friendly neighborhood florist. Next you’ll be accusing me of dressing in some sort of gaudy-plant themed costume and dueling costumed vigilantes on the rooftops when they attempt to thwart a ‘master plan.'”
The thing on the cover reminds me of Godzilla from “Bambi Meets Godzilla”.
So: “It doesn’t list a ‘fawn shop’! I’ll call the pet shop instead.”
That looks really neat! Put it on display and/or in history?
And yes, I was absolutely certain this was going to be about personal safety, too.
It would appear that Junior found more than he bargained for in the yellow pages..