Q: can I have multiple address books on same iphone

Not with the Apple Contacts app. You might look into a 3rd party app that you use exclusively for personal contacts and reserve the Apple Contacts app for business contacts.

If you use iCloud, you can setup "groups" to do what you want, or you can do the same with a contact application on your computer that supports groups.

Actually you can have multiple address books, 1 for each internet account you have......(This is kind of a work around)

For each email you have you can have an address book for that account. This is a great way to create some separation.

To add each email see: Add an email account on your iOS device

Last step, make sure you turn on "contacts" for each email.

So for example I have a yahoo email, and 2 gmails (one work and one for volunteer). What I do is as I meet people from each arena I put their contact info in their appropriate address book. So all of my clients are in the gmail account thats attached to my google voice # that they call. My volunteer contacts are in that gmail account, personal one in Yahoo account.

Here's the tedious part: In order to put them in each specific address book you have to go to that address book on the internet and input contact info there. So for my clients I log into google contacts for that email address and i add them to that address book. From there it automatically appears in my phone in the right address book.

Now when I'm searching for a contact (and its not a client) i just uncheck the gmail address book and this contacts don't show....

**What i'm looking for is a way to be able to add them to each address book directly from the iPhone**

You also need to make sure that the mail account that you add will support contacts. Not all will, especially POP accounts. For example, my POP account from Comcast/Xfinity does not support contact syncing.