Christmas was wonderful and I received a number of neat gifts, from some equally special people. Having a great family is, of course, the best gift of all. My wonderful Mom & Dad gave me (2) Twin Falls Idaho Mountain Bell telephone books (1923, & 1924-5). Each contains about 20-25 pages and are somewhat fragile. They include the towns of; Buhl, Castleford, Eden, Hansen, Hazleton, Hollister, Kimberly, Murtaugh, & Twin Falls, Idaho. I have already scanned them both, but will scan them again before I put them away. The first scan was to a multi-page PDF file with my CanoScan 8600F scanner. This produced a readable file of the whole document. A bit of testing reveals that a search does not come close to finding all of the target names etc, it is a good starting point however. I will scan them again in a higher resolution for archival purposes, then print out copies to use instead of the originals. A perplexing problem with these is that the original? owner used them as scrapbooks, pasting in articles over the top of the directory listing, obscuring them in whole or in part. Some of the newsprint has been removed, much however remains. I have not researched at this point if it will be feasible or safe to try and remove any of the remaining pasted-in articles. Some of the articles have tiny genealogical bits and pieces but the real prize is the info underneath. I can't tell what sort of glue/paste was used. There was a 1932 date on one article and they all appear to be of that vintage. I'd be happy to hear from anyone with experience in this, and will be scouring the web for information.
