From MozillaZine Knowledge Base

You can bring up Mozilla Suite's or Thunderbird's Address Book using the command-line switch "-addressbook" [1].

For example, on Windows:

mozilla.exe -addressbook

thunderbird.exe -addressbook (Might look like this in the Start->Run line 
 "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -addressbook )

And on Mac OS X:

/Applications/Mozilla.app/Contents/MacOS/mozilla -addressbook

/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird -addressbook

You can run these commands in whatever command-line interface your have on your OS (Command Prompt on Windows, Terminal on Mac OS X, et cetera).

See also

• Command line arguments (Thunderbird)