Hello Lover!

Perhaps, I'm sentimental.  Just as everyone is switching to electronic readers, and bookstores are becoming obsolete, I'm figuring out how to build wall bookcases.  Just as everyone is ditching their landline phones and hooking themselves into the digital age with smart phones and apps that make vocabulary, rudimentary knowledge and directional sense irrelevant, I'm pining over retro phones.  Phones with rotaries, no caller ID, antiquities really.  I can see, in the not too distant future, these things will be hazy memories, we reminisce fondly over...remember, when we had books made of paper? Remember the smell?  The sound the pages would make as we turned them, the spine cracking?  Remember phones? The feel of the serpentine cord wrapped around your finger as you paced the floor, tethered to the wall?  Why do I find myself missing them already?

I love this white phone from the 1930s.  Check out that earpiece!

This black Bakelite phone from the 1940s reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock, Dial M for modernism, anyone?

Then there was the Ericofon, designed by Ericcson phone company out of Sweden.  The first year of production was the same year my house was built, 1954!  Check out this amazing advertisement I found in a 1959 issue of Homes and Gardens magazine:

Now check out all the candy colored varieties:

Also from the 50s-60s came the beloved princess phone.  It was available in many colors, but my favorite is the pink, COME ON, it's called the princess phone!  This phone required a separate ringer and additional wiring so that it could light up in the dark.

Lastly, there was the "donut" or "purse phone." Popular in the 70s, it seems like a more stylized descendant of the princess phone.  Made by Western Electric Sculptura, these can be found in both rotary and touch tone.