Telephone Collecting: Seven Decades of Design/With Price Guide

Rating:
Summary: good, but not the discussion of design implied by the title
Review: Although the pictures are lovely, and this book helped me identify a few of my phones, it does not include much discussion of the evolution of telephone style/design. There are pictures of some phones that are not mentioned in the text at all, and phones mentioned but not illustrated. It is a decent beginner's book, but does not go into the detail I wanted.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: This was my first telephone collecting book and it's very disappointing to me, although the pictures are pretty.

Firstly, it only covers phones from the 20's on up, thus leaving out the great old wood and candlestick phone eras almost entirely. There's also almost no history or chronology of the phone's invention or development, during this period, other than a reference to industrial design.

Secondly, it's laid out in an arbitrary way, with examples of phones and short little captions which are hard to link to their correct photo, and with not much sense of how one phone followed another in production history. Occasionally, when showing the more rare phones, it's helpful, but only because of the picture, not the written part.

Thirdly, the author states on one page that a phone was made by "North Electric", which astonished me, since the company, as most people who deal with phones would know, was called "Northern Electric". (I guess maybe she was more interested in West Electric phones.)To me, that's a bad mistake.

Fourthly, the price guide seems flimsy and quickly put together with wide price ranges.

The bottom line is, if you like factual, condensed, categorized, quick-reference type books, this is not for you. This is not your field guide to old phones, by any means.