Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1910-10-22

! There is nothing more remarkable in
the business life of America than the
wonderful expansion of the directory
! making trade during the past two dec
AIDES. When the census made it's investi-
CATION into the printing business few
| years ago. it found that one of the largest
| features of the job printing offices was
| the printing of directories In New York.
| Chicago and Philadelphia alone there were
| 100000 copies of the city directories is
sued. Their aggregate weight was more
! than a thousand tons. and 1t required A.
0t00co impressions to print them. II
| this entire job had been turned off by
single-cylindcr press it would have re-
| qured 10000 impressions a day for four
| teen years.
! The directory publishers of the United
States have banded themselves together
| i'm organization known as the Dfrec-
| tory Publishers Association of America
| which association is now in session III
| Louisville. Ky. The purpose of TINS as
ISOLATION Is to protect its members from
competition and the public from the ii'l-
| position of bogus directory canVaSserS
and dishonest directory makers IL mas
a standing offer of s100 for the arrest ana
conviction of any imposter in connection
with the directory trade. Nearly thou-
sand American cities and towns nave
complete directories. In some of these
/ the printing of an annual directory is not
profitable. but the directory publishers
have an eye to the future. and are ready
| to pre-empt any field which looks prom
| Using. 1t has been the experience OF the
publishers that the first man has an ad-
vantage over any competitor, and that IT
| seldom is profitable to issue second d.
rectory of given city.
Il
<liron h
Usher to secure a copyright which will
protect him from
Bogus Names Used the issuance OF a
rival directory, so
fishes only the names of the inhabitants
and their addresses. 1t would be impos-
sible for any court to tell whether the
rival directory had secured its names
from the original directory or from other
sources. In this way the rival publisher
could simply wait until the other directory
was out, copy it. and sell his book at a
much lower figure. In order to protect
himself against such competition. the di-
rectory maker Incorporates a number of
bogus names. Any competitor who has
merely copied his work will have no
means of knowing which were bogus
names and which were real ones. me
presence of these bogus names in the
rival directory has been taken by the
courts as sufficient proof that the copy
right law has been violated.
There are many thousand telephone dl-
rectOries in the United States, and the ag-
Gregate number of copies issued is larger
than that of all other kinds of directories
together. 1t is estimated that 1t requires
! more than 1J1GOO,WD twenty-four by
thirty-eight inch sheets to print the tele-
phone directories annually distributed in
this country, and that more than three
hundred freight cars would be required
to transport them. While advertising
never has been as much resorted to in
telephone directories as in city directories,
there thousands of advertisers who
realize the advantage of staying close to
the telephone. In many cases the tele-
phone directories are not printed by the
telephone companies, but by individuals
who sell them at price sufficient to
cover the cost of their production. The
profit is made in the advertising space
sold.
=
Although the telephone directory is