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Before there were Yellow Pages, there was the city directory

The phone obviously played an important role in the creation of the phone book. It was its raison d’être, the natural-fit framing element for connecting businesses and customers.

But what if I told you that there was a book with a format very similar to the Yellow Pages, except it existed nearly a century before the telephone was even invented? Let me tell you a little bit about the concept of the city directory, which is essentially a phone book for addresses. Much like the Yellow Pages, it combines listings of businesses, broken down by name and category or geographic area, as well as a series of full-page advertisements promoting various businesses in the city. Sure, you couldn’t call these businesses up, but you could look up their info and use that to determine where you could go if you needed a lawyer or upholsterer.

The first of these directories appeared in large East Coast cities—Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, with Philly getting its first sometime around 1785. (Check it out here.) At first, they weren’t much to write home about—just lists of businesses and business owners with their current addresses, often in larger type than the modern day phone book. But gradually, these books began to open up for advertising, and that advertising looks extremely similar to the modern Yellow Pages—organized listings that promote specific types of businesses.

While Philadelphia might have brought them to life, it was Chicago where these guides came into their own, proving a dominant way of exposing businesses to the public. The website Chicagology has a retrospective on these directories, taking the approach of directly publishing source material in full. It’s a confusing read, but still makes one thing clear: Competition was fierce, with multiple directories appearing in some years. The publishers and compilers of these directories—including Richard Edwards, Robert Fergus, and John C.W. Bailey—likely spent all year filling out the books with relevant information about the city’s many businesses, large and small.

Around the same time, the telephone emerged as an effective communications medium. While it took some time to reach everyone, it’s arguable that it simplified the connections city directories were meant to facilitate. Imagine how frustrating it might be to go out of your way to look for something in person, only to find it’s not there.

The person who apparently put two and two together was a man named Reuben H. Donnelley, who took over his father’s directory-printing business around the time it took over the contract to print the phone books from Bell. He saw an opportunity to merge interests. (Both Donnelley and his father, Richard Robert Donnelley, had namesake businesses that outlived them; only R.R. Donnelley is active under its current name today.)

Ammon Shea’s 2010 book The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads lays the invention of the Yellow Pages at the younger Donnelley’s feet:

The Donnelley Company was the largest printer of telephone directories for the twentieth century. By the time Reuben Donnelley passed away in 1929, he had amassed a personal fortune of over ten million dollars. By all accounts, he was a well-respected businessman, known for his honesty and civic spirit. Although a fine individual, in many ways he is responsible for the extraordinary glut of yellow pages in our midst today, for it was Reuben Donnelley, more than anyone else, who showed how lucrative selling ads in yellow pages could be.

It wasn’t a perfect transition to advertising the hell out of phone numbers—Shea notes that Donnelley had to work around a 12-year ban on advertising in the books, which explains why the 1892 version of the Chicago phone book, credited to Donnelley and on the Internet Archive, is so advertising-bereft. But once the ban was lifted, the books gained a lot of commercial power.

In aggregate, the Yellow and White Pages are one of the most valuable datasets on the planet

When AT&T was forced to break off its phone empire in the early 1980s, one of the points of silver lining was that it allowed the company to compete in new areas. It allowed the company to move itself more into technology, for example, not that it worked out.

Why did AT&T want to become a tech company? Simply put, it had access to an impressive resource well suited for improved technology: The Yellow Pages. In the years before the breakup, it publicly floated an electronic Yellow Pages. One problem: Before the breakup, they were not allowed to diversify in this way. So this seemingly opened up an opportunity for them.

However, AT&T’s hand ultimately did not amount to much, as competitors quickly reshaped the sector. A 1987 Time piece noted that AT&T’s fracturing created an opening for new Yellow Pages offerings, including from companies with no previous ties to the phone industry. There were even cases where one Baby Bell went into the market of another just to distribute phone books.

“Under divestiture, the directory business has started to become an industry,” telecom consultant C. Richard Stigelman told the magazine.

It makes sense that Yellow Pages became a competitive front in the years after the splintering: Previously, it was a pure monopoly, and regulators like Reagan-era antitrust regulator William F. Baxter saw it for what it was. In a 1982 Judiciary Committee hearing, Baxter put it like this:

One must ask, why isn’t the price of the Yellow Pages driven down, as it would be by competition, to its costs, so that it is not extremely profitable for anybody? Competitive activities are not extremely profitable; they just return competitive rates of return.

The answer is that there is a very, very important feature of monopoly power in the Yellow Pages. What gives rise to the monopoly profits that are associated with the Yellow Pages is the monopoly which the local telephone company has over the computerized listing of local business phone numbers. That computerized listing is something that the local companies will be in a position to sell off.

Baxter’s point, it could be said, underlines a truism about the Yellow Pages. Even considering the advertising, the data that the Yellow Pages collected was ultimately the most valuable part. By having a de facto monopoly on that market, it was allowed to exploit that data for all it was worth.

With AT&T’s power shrinking, other companies were able to exploit the interest in the Yellow Pages and the White Pages, including in the digital realm. In 1985, the company American Business Lists launched a service called The Instant Yellow Page Service, which charged people $1 a minute for access to a database, 10¢ per printed record, and $15 a month just for base access. But what those consumers got in exchange was something previously difficult to access—easily searchable records of businesses in outside cities.

“A sales manager’s dream come true: instance access to any Yellow Page listing in the country, by city, county, state, or zip code,” one columnist wrote of the endeavor. “You can even do a nationwide search of all businesses with specific kinds of listings.”

While The Instant Yellow Page Service didn’t set the world ablaze, it was a sign of what was truly valuable about these listings—the ability to access data at your fingertips. And it turned out that the truly valuable thing about the phone book, despite its roots as a utility, wasn’t the actual numbers. Instead, they were an inroad to making city directories, of the kind Chicago specialized in, more valuable.

As landlines began to lose their hold on us, the phone books stopped being about the numbers—it was really about the connections they fostered.

And during the internet era, this point only became more obvious. WhitePages.com, a dot-com era startup built by a wet-behind-the-ears Stanford graduate who bought the domain as a side project, eventually evolved into a major seller of background checks. (That feels far removed from its original purpose.)

And YellowPages.com, which was also not initially owned by any of the phone companies, but sure felt like it was, is effectively a local advertising play now.

Even the Baby Bells benefited from the Yellow Pages. Within five years of the breakup, while other parts of the broken-up legacy business struggled to adapt, many of them had specifically excluded the Yellow Pages from their regulated ventures. They were just too profitable to rein in.

But in a funny way, even with all the shifts in the market, AT&T and the Yellow Pages were just too star-struck to stay away from one another, even in a digital climate. See, while YellowPages.com wasn’t actually founded by the phone companies, it eventually landed in the hands of the modern-day AT&T through a series of complicated mergers and acquisitions.

The modern AT&T is essentially a merged version of the Baby Bells SBC and BellSouth, which acquired YellowPages.com in a joint venture in the mid-2000s, only to eventually merge together within two years of that acquisition happening. Just before that merger, SBC bought AT&T and took its name. Not long after that, the newly rechristened AT&T had gotten exclusive distribution rights for the iPhone. AT&T’s boardroom was particularly busy between 2004 and 2007, and in the midst of all that, it regained a digital hold of what was once seen as a key element of the former monopoly’s power.

But it soon became clear that the Yellow Pages of the 2010s weren’t as profitable as the Yellow Pages of the 1980s. In the years immediately after the merger, the Yellow Pages brand was de-emphasized, shifting to YP.com, and AT&T eventually spun it out once more.

Even if the phone company wants nothing to do with the Yellow Pages anymore, it’s hard to deny its roots.