There was no familiar thump on Toronto front porches and or in apartment building lobbies this spring.

No pile of thick books by the building’s mailboxes. No youngsters thumbing through to find their families’ names.

The telephone book white pages — a household icon started in 1879 that not only enabled Torontonians to find each other, but also propped open doors, kindled fires and boosted small fry — was not delivered.

“Geez, I didn’t even notice,” said Heather Missouri, a customs consultant.

There you have it. Not many did.

The publisher got 1,000 requests for the absent 2010 directory — that’s out of more than a million households that would have received it. While once upon a time newspapers heralded the book’s annual arrival, marvelling at its expanding girth, a measure of a city’s growth and wealth, today Toronto’s home telephone book may well be out of service, as passé as rotary dial.

The Yellow Pages Group, Canada’s leading provider of print and online directories, has asked the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission to no longer require mass distribution of the residential listings phone book in seven big cities, including Toronto. In those cities, home and business listings are in separate directories. The phone book for businesses, the yellow pages, is still slated for door-to-door delivery.

The requested change would save 3,500 metric tons of paper every year, says Annie Marsolais, communications director for Yellow Pages Group. The CRTC is still reviewing the matter.

More consumers are letting their fingers do the scrolling, searching online for home phone numbers or storing them on their cellphones, she explains. Some cellphone users no longer bother with a land line and aren’t listed in any directory.

“Our industry is evolving and we have to adapt,” says Marsolais.

About two to five per cent of the normal run of home phone books will be printed. But those who want them need to request them. Consumers can ask for the 2010 ones by calling 1-800-268-5637 or by visiting ypg.com/delivery. More than 35,000 printed copies are presently in storage.

This is a long-distance trend. Earlier in May, Verizon, the largest phone company in New York State, also asked regulators for permission to end mass delivery. Such approval has already been granted to distributors in four states.

Starting in 2006, Marsolais points out, delivery went from yearly to every other year, with little consumer outcry. Less than 2 per cent of customers requested a directory in the off years.

Sitting in a downtown food court with a BlackBerry and an Internet tablet in front of him, Jarek Piorkowski, 22, looks momentarily baffled when asked about his use of the telephone book. “The last time was maybe four or five years ago,” he says. “All that printed stuff just goes to waste. People just chuck it into recycling.”

Not so fast. Others not only use the phone book, they’re actually nostalgic about it.

“Who doesn’t look up their name?” laughs Christine Elias, a communications director at the University of Toronto. “One of my happiest moments was when I got my first apartment and there in the phone book was my name in print.”

The last delivered Toronto white pages, 2008-2010, weighed in with 1,413 pages of residential listings. Toronto’s first in 1879, a mere three years after the invention of the telephone, had 56 business and residential names and addresses, including George Brown and Oliver Mowat, on six pages.

With a keen eye for self-promotion, Bingham & Taylor, “fine printers, 11 Leader Lane,” issued the directory with large ads on each page.

The telephone directory of 1904, the oldest hard copy at the Toronto Reference Library, had grown to 276 pages with 11,627 home and business listings. Back then, a name in the phone book was a tangible sign of prestige, of being wealthy enough to afford a telephone. A breezy, “Call me — I’m in the book” had a certain ring to it.

“There was a bit of class snobbery,” says Alan Middleton, marketing professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business. “‘Oh, they’re not listed. They must not have a phone.’ The unwashed immigrants didn’t have phones.”

The new phone book was eagerly awaited each year. In 1911, the Daily Star ran a Saturday front page story announcing the new Adelaide exchange and the Monday distribution of the up-to-date books “with the greatest possible speed.”

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The story merited front-page space next to photos of Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Sir Frederick Borden in London and a story about the upcoming coronation of King George V, “the most splendid pageant on which the modern world has looked.”

The phone book was that important?

“Think of it as the start of the information age,” explains Middleton. “The phone directory was an early database that allowed you to access people.”

The social media of its time. “We’ve always been fascinated with technology that enables us to connect with people,” he says.

The thickness of the phone book mirrored the city’s growth and prosperity, or lack thereof. In 1935, during the Depression, the Daily Star wrote on page 1 that 3,000 more names would be in the new phone directory, “carrying the torch for the return of good times.”

By 1950, as the postwar economy recovered, the directory was a hefty 1,721 pages. Star readers were advised to get in training before the new book arrived.

Through the years, the phone book, of course, had its practical uses, door jam, table leg support, even toilet paper. Some people stashed birth certificates, bank notes, leases in its many pages.

“Some books look like safety deposit boxes when they reach us,” said a phone company manager in 1938. Old books were collected and given to the Veterans Association, which sold the paper.

Today old phone books are recycled into coffee trays, egg cartons, cereal boxes. Again, practical uses.

But the Star found little sympathy for ye ole phone book.

“Look, we loved the Eaton’s catalogue but that’s gone,” says Middleton. “I’m afraid certain icons do disappear. They become outdated.”

Even Elias, who enjoyed seeing her name in tiny print, admits that she has at times bypassed a phone book pile in her condo building lobby without bothering to take one. “It seemed like a pain to lug it upstairs,” she says. “But I did feel sad.”

nwhite@thestar.ca