How quaint. A phone book, left in our mailbox here in the south of France.

I thought they had gone the way of the afternoon newspaper. Curiosities remembered by old people. “Back in my day …”

But there it was, the pages jaunes bit of it, that is. The yellow pages. Which perhaps remains useful and profitable, after the long-ago death of the (individual person) white pages.

(Remember when you lived in the big city and the annual phone book was at least as thick and heavy as several volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica? Often the youngest child, was boosted to meat-stabbing height at the dinner table by sitting on the glorious compendium of digits.)

So, I was so curious about the pages jaunes that I flipped through it, and discovered a book fighting to remain relevant and not doing a bad job of it.

Entering from the front, the first thing you notice is a pages and pages of a 2017 “diary/day minder” with facing pages (6.6 inches by 11.5) for each of the 52 weeks of the coming year. Just what the busy family needs to keep track of assignments and meetings and holidays.

It includes “reminders” in the upper-left corner, then breaks down the day by hours, beginning at 8 a.m. and ending at 9 p.m. (Those of us here in the Herault area of France don’t stay up or go out later than that, anyway.)

Then comes a list of emergency numbers, which is handy (911 in France is broken down to 15 for medical emergencies, 17 for the police, 18 for the firemen …), followed by the “useful” phone numbers for issues ranging from drug addiction to a family psychologist, followed by “green” informationall the utility companies. (Not that anyone will answer.)

Then we get to the yellow pages which, in France as in the States, are taken up with business listings, by topic.

In French, interesting, “abbatoir” (slaughterhouse) is the first business, alphabetically, and I know now where to get my animals professionally dispatched.

This is helpful stuff, if you don’t know where this or that service is located, or if it exists, and the final two-thirds of the book, printed on that thin paper, is jammed with numbers, and the occasional advertisement.

A final addition, far as I know, are fairly detailed maps of the Herault as well as seven of the largest cities in its environs.

It is a helpful, interesting book, and I may even use that dayminder (on nice, heavy paper) in the front of the book.

Now, if only I could carry it around in my pocket.