No book written in the last fifty years should be read. ?talo Calvino, H.L. Mencken, or someone said this. Time ennobles, matures, and offers perspective. But by heeding this dictum one runs the risk of not opening the telephone book, which is one of the worst misfor tunes that can happen to a human being. The strategy of the tele phone book is to succeed in the present and not the future. In an attempt to define it, I realize that it's not only a list, but an ambitious and superhuman one. Is this wrong? Isn't Moby-Dick?a list of the varieties of Cet?cea (whales), maritime techniques, and port idiosyncrasies?also one? Or the Bible?a record of the descen dants of Adam, and of God's annoyances? The dictionary, the Encyclopedia Britannica, sl menu, and a pocket diary are also lists. The list is the primordial text of our era, the key to chaos. But no list does what the telephone book proposes to do: alphabetically organ ize all the citizens of a determined geography. Its method of prepa ration is scientific and rigorous, but the final product is neither impersonal nor abstract; on the contrary, the telephone book is a tri umph of fantasy as sister to reason. How many times, upon dialing a number, do I hear: is no one here by that name. From which one deduces that Reginald Czech is apocryphal, even though he's listed in those pages as a man of flesh and bones, as solid as any other. There is no human enterprise that isn't condemned to error, however minor, and the telephone book is no exception. The errors found within are quite estimable though: at a time when gov ernments boast about knowing who is who and where, this list of infinite phonetic and numerical variations, upon including imagi nary data, constitutes an affront to absolute truth. Even with its mistakes and non sequiturs, the telephone book is completely reliable. No one would dare to doubt its information because, if one were to do so, its entire worth would be annulled. Always prepared to reach its objective, it lists the data starting with the first letter of a surname. Yes, it's sometimes repetitive, but who isn't? It constrains millions of individuals onto a few pages. What other book boasts such an ambitious goal? The encyclopedia pre