Of course, for Burt Bacharach, it was a Little Red Book…
Written for the movie What’s New, Pussycat in 1965. Manfred Mann performed it for the movie, and LOVE did a version, too.
Here, Burt plays piano and Elvis Costello sings it:
Warning: This is a days-long earworm for me.
The internet has amazing resources.
The Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode was Terror on Dinosaur Island, which first aired the day after Christmas, 1965. You can find the script here:
Here’s the relevant portion:
A little more:
A quick look on the Google N-gram viewer shows that “little black book” has been around since before 1900. There’s a peak in usage from about 1940-1960, then it died away before starting to rise again about 1990, hitting a peak much higher than the earlier one in 2014. It’s falen off since then, but is still higher than the WWII use.
Some research shows examples of “little black book” to mean “a book of confidential information” dating to the 1910s. That could easily have migrated.
The OED dates the phrase in the meaning of sex partners to 1940:
6. An address book, spec. one used to record the names and contact details of (potential) sexual partners. Also figurative. Frequently in little black book.
1940 Life 22 Apr. 14/2 There was a slight flurry in the crowded courtroom as Miss Francis’ little black book, which is supposed to read like a who’s who of the cinema, was produced.
Let’s get in the Wayback machine to 1955 and the Bob Cummings Show (also known as Love That Bob). He was the 1950’s version of a player, and he definitely had a little black book. His slavishly devoted late-teen nephew who lived with him (played by Dwayne Hickman) was always scheming to get his hands on it.
Some of those early hits are fascinating. It’s clear that “little black book“ meant a small private book of observations quite far back, with the implications being, at least among all the ones I browsed, nonsexual.
Yeah, but it’s equally clear from context that the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea usage implied a book of Hot Dates, and definitely sexual to at least that extent.
Wasn’t it also a trope that bookies kept there open tallies on people in a little black book?
Yeah, not disagreeing with your observation, just noting with interest the phrase’s pervasiveness with an implication of secret stuff.
Based on the various cites from entertainment media uncovered in this thread, by the 1950s and 1960s, I suspect that that implication was well-known enough in the culture that it became an easy shorthand for writers to use to indicate that a character (typically male) who had such a book was a “playboy.” I’d also suspect that the implication also swamped other, non-sexual uses of the phrase.
I agree entirely. But don’t tell me. Tell Maserschmidt.
The little black book got around. Greta Garbo had one in 1931. Sadly, it was a ledger of expenses recorded by the famously cheap star. Little black books could be diaries, or listings of performances or rules manuals or catalogs or names of potential political appointees or expert tradesmen or a small notebook to jot almost anything. The hits on Chronicling America go back well into the 19th century.
A couple of pre-1940 hits have sexual implications. The story “Deadlocked” by Hazel Deyo Batchelor in the Washington Evening Star, July 11, 1927, has a artist put the name of a beauty he wants to paint in his little black book. But she’s a good girl, at least in Chapter 1.
Even better, the Brownsville Herald on March 24, 1930, gave many column inches over to Dorothy, no last name, who was in a frenzy because she had been burgled. Along with jewels and other good stuff, they had taken her little black book, which contained all the telephone numbers of her boy friends. Sadly, Dorothy didn’t know “where the boy-friends live at all or who they are really” so reconstructing her list will be impossible.
The syndicated article makes a big deal about the modern era in which girls telephone boys instead of vice versa, but me, I have some suspicions about Dorothy and they don’t make her a typical flapper.
LOL. Yeah, rather unsubtle tell.
[Hmm, still under construction, never mind.]
I can’t speak as to its use on screen, but the expression is at least as old as 1940, when it was used in Life to designate the client list of the notorious Hollywood madam, Lee Francis.
The earliest usage in television that I found of “little black book” in the amorous sense was an episode of The Phil Silvers Show called Operation Love from 1958.
The earliest movie usage might be The Blue Gardenia which was released in March 1953, so it predates Kiss Me, Kates release as a film by about 7 months. Maybe Kiss Me, Kate was responsible for popularizing the term, but it appears Blue Gardenia beat it.
No idea if these are definitive answers.
I have been looking around for early instances of “little black book”, in the sense of “list of sex partners” or “booty call directory”, in print.
Interestingly, in the 19th century the phrase seems to be overwhelmingly used to refer to a copy of the Bible, or occasionally some other work of (Christian) theology. Very much in the context of a textual constant companion that goes with one everywhere.
Then in early 20th century usage the idea of the “little black book” as a textual constant companion seems to have largely shifted towards a personal notebook for recording expenditures, notes, etc.
So the evolution of the term’s connotation seems to have been roughly as follows:
That song has been sporadically stuck in my head for years. I’d never think to look it up until I was in a position where I couldn’t, so it just sat there, gnawing away at my memory, jettisoning things like how many of my parents are still alive in an attempt to make room for itself.
Oddly, yesterday after seeing this thread I came across an old mention for the 40s of a LBB.
I actually have the near-equivalent of my father’s LBB. He had a little booklet of names and numbers people to look up (almost all women) as he went across country during WWII from basic to leaving for overseas.
Already mentioned.