Long Beach Home Telephone & Telegraph Co. Directory No. 1 [caption title]

[Los Angeles?], 1903. About very good.. Broadside, 13 x 9 inches on salmon-colored card stock. Light wear, a few small edge tears. First section poorly printed resulting in some loss or obfuscation. The first telephone directory for Long Beach, California. Residential telephones began appearing in Long Beach homes in the early 1900s, when the Long Beach Home Telephone & Telegraph Com. was founded by W.L. Porterfield. By 1903, there were 169 locations with telephones in a city of 3,000 people, and this necessitated the publication of a directory for the community. This first directory, printed on a single sheet, lists all users alphabetically. The bulk of the listings are for businesses, ranging from the Wilson-Hill Co. undertakers to the Long Beach Gas Co., San Pedro Lumber and the Salt Lake Hotel. Along the bottom edge is an advertisement for W. Clifford Smith Co., dealers in feed and fuel. No addresses are provided with the listings. The first eleven lines appear to have been printed with damaged type or fouled in some way, affecting legibility. The broadside also includes instructions for how to use this new-fangled equipment. Three institutional listings for runs of the directory are note din OCLC -- at the Huntington, the California Genealogical Society, and the Mid-Continent Public Library in Missouri. Rare.