When I was young I used to marvel at the pictures in the PTT-catalogue. Sometime in the 80’s, the telephones provided by PTT were printed in nice colours in the telephone book. Those were the days before internet and we had only 2 TV channels, so I used to read about everything I could lay my hands on. Including the telephone book.
I remember seeing those beautiful touch tone telephones. They were truly the epitome of high tech. And there was the transparent PTT T65 Delft too! Pure sci-fi! I asked my parents if we could buy one of those nice telephones, but they deemed it too expensive.
In those days everybody had a grey rotary telephone. You hardly ever saw something different. We had one of those W65 wall phones in the hall way.
When I started collecting telephones, and in particular red telephones, I soon had a red specimen of the Unifoon for only a couple of euros. It stood around untouched for years and I was under the impression that I had this classic covered and could strike it of my list of must haves. Until in late 2013 I decided to give it a good clean and polish. After washing the outer shell and handset, they turned out to be seriously faded! That is not a problem easily solved. As an experiment I sanded it back to its original colour, but polishing it I never got that mirror smooth finish.
In short, after all these years it turned out I had to go and find another one! And of course, suddenly they are hard to find, and when one turns up it is expensive.
And then I stumbled upon one, in the junk shop just around the corner for only € 3,50. Very nice specimen, with unwritten number card. And it is a TDK (touch tone, DTMF) to boot, so it can be used normally.
And the other beautiful telephones I saw in the telephone book? Well, I have those too: the Delft, the Diavox, the Wenen (Vienna). I even have that old grey one, that was hanging in our hallway. I never dreamt that one day I would have them all.
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