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My question comes from the book American Tabloid by James Ellroy. The sentence reads:

Pete grabbed his reverse book off the backseat. He skimmed it by the dashboard light. 1541 North Alta Vista matched to: Darleen Shoftel

What is a "reverse book"? In the only translation of the book into Turkish, it is translated as "telephone directory", but from the rest of the scene, it is clear that it is not a telephone directory. I thought it might be a notebook in which he keeps certain addresses, but the remaining section does not validate that assumption either.

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They used to have "reverse telephone directories," where the entries were ordered alphabetically by telephone number and by street address. If you had one of these, you could look up a street address and find out who lived there (something you couldn't do easily with a regular telephone directory).

Here is a Library of Congress webpage which explains these and tells how to find them in the Library of Congress. If I am understanding this webpage correctly, they are still printing them, although I don't know why anybody would want them today.

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    Today, a mobile phone reverse look-up is used by many. Commented yesterday

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