The Payphone Project will be on auto-pilot for the next few weeks (or months) as I re-introduce the “Daily Payphone” feature from The Payphone Project’s Facebook Page.

Every weekday since last year I’ve curated a series of carefully selected images of public telephones, phone booths, and anything to do with payphones around the world (with occasional gratuitous links to my own stuff).

I tend to favor photos from sources and photographers who do not make payphones a regular part of their subject matter. I find a joy and randomness in those photos that is not present among those trying to build their career as a photographer on the sadly ironic world of today’s payphones.

The Payphone Project’s Facebook Page has accumulated over 6000 “Likes” but surprisingly few page views, so sharing and eventually continuing the series here should not create much over-exposure.

As appropriate I will not be shy about butting in on the Daily Payphone series with site updates or other news from the world of payphones. Most of my observations about what is happening in the payphone realm should post to The Payphone Project’s Twitter Feed.

I am not exactly going on hiatus, nor have I been on vacation (despite the lack of updates here and at my other web projects). I have begun cobbling together outlines and chapters for a couple of books, one of which would attempt to convey what I have learned about payphones since starting The Payphone Project in 1995.

On that December night in my teeny-tiny Upper East Side apartment I am certain I never expected I would still be doing this project 19 years later.

Since that night I have endured months and even years during which I simply could not stand thinking about payphones.

But this seemingly insatiable paystation fetish does not appear to have damaged my reputation or caused threat to life or limb.

So the dial tone drones on.

Over the last few months I began writing essays (which have turned out to be quite lengthy) on certain aspects of public telephones in modern life. I intended to post said essays to this web site.

I concluded last week that the subject matter (and my approach to narrating it) is simply too involved for a series of web site postings. I am not flattering myself by saying so but it needs fuller treatment, which I hope to deliver.

I imagine a standard “History of the Payphone” would begin with William Grey’s invention of the payphone in 1889 and end with lyrics to that detestable Maroon 5 song of the same name.

This would not be that book.

Nor would it be a mere recycling of material from this or other of my web sites (though I would be unafraid to dip in to these sites’ content).

While I do believe the sociological relevance of public telephones in America has received short shrift from telephone historians I do not imagine I would be the one to compensate for that dearth of attention by writing its history. Mine would be more of a narrative tale, or series of tales, in which the role of public telephones in my life (and in the public life of New York City) is documented and assessed, with broader cultural insights as appropriate. Mine would be a narrative history of the payphone world as I remember it, and what I learned about it whilst running The Payphone Project (with particular focus on New York City’s colorful payphone past).

I have no delusions of grandeur about this pursuit, should it even come to fruition. It would make me no money, the few people who would read it would probably not pay for it, and the amount of work required to do this properly would almost certainly cost me more time than I have in my already over-extended life.

Nevertheless, having learned far more about the subject then I reveal in these web postings, I feel that putting what I know about payphones between two covers is just something I have to do, or at least try to do.

The series of weekday “Daily Payphone” postings should start Wednesday. I’ve resumed wrestling with WordPress, finding its random recalcitrances and continuous demands for attention to be aggravating as all hell. I did a lousy job of planning for the move to WordPress but I am out of time with which to switch it back or do something else, so here I am.

This is nothing specifically to do with that particular content management system but its continuous annoyances remind me of what I long ago concluded: Technology does not make most people’s lives easier. It favors a certain non-universal mentality that does not communicate with and is unavailable to the rest of us.

I imagine a time when our human race will remember the Internet as one of the great wonders of the world. It was a massive, unimaginable sprawl of packets and fibers that connected many at the expense of ostracizing even more. The resources it consumed and the antipathies it evoked created unsustainable hostilities among nations. It became like a Death Star. It became a target. It was not criminals or terrorists who brought down the Internet. They needed it too much. It was nihilists and anarchists who found its unshielded exhaust vent into which they deposited a bleeding heart.

Whoosh.