Hurrah! You will no longer be cursed with unwanted White Pages. No more automatic delivery of half a pulped tree. For a while there was discussion of delivering the book directly to your recycling bin, but now they're going to stop altogether.

It's about time. Looking up a number has gone the way of walking across the room to change the TV channel, or lifting the tone arm of a record player because the album was over.

No, wait. I did that last week. I was bequeathed a number of old records of historical value, and since I had kicked my turntable to the trash a decade ago, I had to buy another one. It brought back all the old vinyl memories — the dustball on the needle, the shhhhick of an album pulled from its sleeve, the comforting throat-clearing sound the needle made when it found the groove and the music hadn't started yet, the irritation of the irritation of the irritation of SKRRRRR from a record that skipped on a scratch. But now I've become one of those tiresome vintage enthusiasts who scours the Goodwill bins for "Atomic Kon-Tiki Cocktail Music for Moon Lovers."

Vinyl is hip again, and that leads me to believe that phone books will get the vintage-cool treatment someday as well. An inordinately bearded man in his late 20s will open up a White Pages Emporium and stand behind a counter with several phone books attached to thick chains. The article in the community paper will read:

"Looking up something on the Internet, calling 411 on your phone — it's really kinda soulless," says A. Wyzchezknewksi, co-owner of Number Please. "When you open the phone book and page through the listings, you get a sense of how many people live here, the names of the streets."

For a small fee, Number Please will look up the phone number by hand, the old-fashioned way. "Our staff is trained in advance, so if you're looking for Dick Beezer, they're going to start in the first fifth of the book. An amateur would open the book earlier, not realizing how many Andersons there are. It's really a lost art."

He added: "We write the number down with a fountain pen on the inside of a matchbook."

Wyzchezknewksi's previous venture, a service that forwarded 911 calls to authorities via messenger pigeons or unicycle riders, closed in 2009, although lawsuits are still ongoing.

Number Please occupies the retail space previously held by a shop that printed Instagram photos on cupcakes.