World Trade: Global Yellow Pages

Looking for a mica miner in the Malagasy Republic? Need to find a chemical plant in Czechoslovakia? Like to buy a typewriter in Thailand? Anyone can find these three—and 2,900 other categories of business in 136 countries—by thumbing through a new kind of directory called the International Yellow Pages. Conceived by Robert A. Nellson, 50, a Rochester, N.Y., advertising executive, International Yellow Pages has gone through two editions since it was first published in 1963. A new and bigger third edition is now being prepared; it will contain 540,000 listings (including country, town, street address and telephone number), go to 36,000 users around the world.

Nellson, a onetime space salesman for U.S. classified telephone directories, hit on his idea when he discovered that many U.S. customers were anxious to advertise in foreign directories, but that most government-owned telephone companies abroad would not accept their advertising. With three friends, Nellson raised $690,000, designed a hard-cover multilingual book in which listings are printed in English, French, Spanish and German, found agents abroad to check out telephone listings and sell advertising space, which costs $1,200 a page. Revenues from the third edition have already reached $475,000, helped by a 30% rise in advertising by companies behind the Iron Curtain. The new edition pushes Nellson’s venture into the black two years before he anticipated making any profit.

U.S. or foreign businessmen who buy the book (for $20 a copy) are finding it valuable both to locate suppliers in out-of-the-way places and to attract potential customers. Where no listing is given, subscribers can call on an additional service: the yellow book will run a special check on a particular kind of business. Among recent requests: a Moroccan inquiry for the names of U.S. nudist-magazine publishers.

Nellson’s list runs for 1,736 pages, from Aden (bone sellers, dates, gums and spices) to Zambia (cement makers, mining companies, clothing manufacturers). The International Yellow Pages also locates beeswax in Angola, molasses in the British West Indies, yacht charterers in Cambodia, industrial real estate agents and vodka vendors in the Soviet Union, lawyers in the Fiji Islands, safari services in Kenya, coconut harvesters in Tanzania. Even Pope Paul’s Vatican City telephone number is in the book: Vatican City 698.