Bless the telephone.
Shopping for artifacts of landline communication.
Bless the telephone.
No, not the one you’re most likely reading this on. The old one, whose curly cord I would coil my fingers in while chatting with my crush. I started reminiscing about telephones when I saw a Picturephone (below) from the 1980s—you could swap out the image for anything you like: the faraway beloved you were calling long-distance, a nature scene to gaze at while deep-breathing to the soothing drone of the dial-tone, your boss’s face for calling in sick, the Chinese take-out menu…
Any evolution in technology creates artifacts. I’m interested in the artifacts from life with telephones before cell phones, like this sign I found at the Lagunilla flea market in Mexico City, which must’ve been for a public phone:
A friend recently pointed out to me that if there was some kind of emergency and I lost access to my iPhone, I wouldn’t know anyone’s numbers. (For the record, I know my mom’s phone number by heart, and can still rattle off all my childhood friends’ landlines, including that of the friend whose parents paid to have their phone number spell out the letters of their last name—90s flex.)
So when I saw this miniature vintage address book with a slider that flips it open to the letter of the alphabet, I bought it with the intention to fill it with everyone’s numbers. (It is still blank.)
If you’d like to join the address book revolution, you could buy this cutie one for 15 bucks on eBay, or this bejeweled keychain version, this gorgeous golden Japanese one, an accordion-style “phone diary” that’s feeding my current moiré obsession in a roundabout way, this pink Soviet one if you want to organize your contacts by the Cyrillic alphabet, or this Personal Yellow Pages.
Phone books used to be really cute. Look at this one from Woodbine Station, Georgia—the circled numbers!!
Another artifact: the gossip bench, with a built-in seat and shelf for the telephone—a little place to sit and chat. (They don’t all cost thousands of dollars.)
I will now only be taking calls on this Korean mother-of-pearl inlaid phone (with built-in mirror!). OK fine, you can also reach me on my shoe phone, citrus phone, corn phone, frog phone, cat phone, or my secret phone.
You know who has a robust collection of vintage novelty phones? Emma Zack of Berriez (who is also newly on Substack). She’s got a tomato phone, a piano phone, a cow phone… “What’s more fun than answering a call on a phone shaped like a cheeseburger?” She asks. “It’s whimsical, baby!” Her collection started when she met a woman who was downsizing her own enormous phone collection on eBay. Here’s an article about it from Collectors News November 1993:
My actual phone is never not on silent, but if I had a custom ringtone it would be the cheerful little melody from “telephone song” by the Japanese band 800 cherries, which I discovered in this mix of 90s Shibuya-kei cassettes from Clover Records—I’ve been listening on repeat.
Finally, to heal this wave of nostalgia, the only solution is to hug this soft sculpture made from recycled materials by Erin McComb:
There’s a story in Mildew Issue 4 about Futel, a mysterious organization that buys old defunct payphones from eBay and hacks them to make them free. At the time of writing, they operated twenty-one free-phones across the US, where anyone who happens to walk past can pick up the receiver and phone a friend, talk to the operator, say they’re sorry on the Apology Line, or dial the mayor.
“They’re radically accessible communication tools,” the founder of Futel told Mildew. “You don’t need money, you don’t need an app, you don’t need an identity.”
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Read more in Mildew Issue 4.