Dead wood media day 2: The Phone Book
Over the last few days we haven’t been able to go anywhere, not even to the bathroom, without taking Henrietta Thompson’s fabulous new tome The Phone Book with us. Billed as a handy guide to the world’s favourite invention it is in fact soft porn for mobile phone junkies with pics and descriptions of all those mobiles you loved and lost (invariably on the 73 bus) yet wished you still had.
It’ll take you back to the days when phones weighed more than briefcases and indeed you needed to carry round a briefcase of notes to actually pay the tariff. The brilliantly researched book also picks up on lots of really cool far eastern handsets, fast forwards into the future and predicts the rise of the phone as the uber-gagdet and has some interesting case studies on recent handsets like the Chav’s nation’s fave the Motorola RAZR. If you enjoyed Gordon Laing’s amazing Digital Retro and you love your mobi this has to be top of your Xmas shopping list.
