Telephone Collectors International was born almost 35 years ago. It was a group effort on the part of many collectors who were looking for a new club with a different focus. A large percentage of those who formed the club are alive and well today and are members of both TCI and the original club.
TCI’s focus is different in that the education of its members is the primary goal. The monthly newsletter contains telephone and telephone related articles, many of which are written by members or reprinted from old journals and reference books. The organization also caters to switchers, those members who work or did work in telephone switching offices and whose primary interest is switches, building and restoring old switches, and reading and writing articles on switching that appear in a periodical known as Switchers’ Quarterly, published by TCI. TCI is also unique in that it offers an electronic membership where one or both newsletters is provided those members by way of email, at a lower annual membership fee.
TCI also sponsors an “open” listserve where anyone interested in telephony can join over 800 others with similar interests without having to join TCI. Many find once they are involved in the day to day listserve exchanges that TCI membership can provide a number of added advantages for a very reasonable annual fee.
The TCI monthly newsletter, Singing Wires, is generally 12 pages in length and contains in addition to the content stated above, members’ ads listing items for sale or trade, and items wanted to buy. The “E” version of the Singing Wires is also 12 pages, in color, and includes as many as 10-30 or more “bonus pages” that are not cost effective to print. The “E” version is also available to those who subscribe to the mailed version. The Switchers’ Quarterly is published four times per year and is also available on line.
We hope you will consider TCI membership. You can learn much, much more about the organization by clicking on this link to our website (www.telephonecollectors.org).
You will find a huge amount of information available to you, especially what’s
provided in the technical library.
If you have any questions, e-mail them to me at
membership@telephonecollectors.org
GO TO THE TCI WEBSITE NOW