The Magic of Paper Maps
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- Опубликовано: 24 июл 2023
- Even though we have an infinitely vast resource of digital and internet maps in our smartphones, Adam talks about the what makes the physical atlas an invaluable and beloved resource. Here's how he made use of the essential Thomas Guide line of maps he owned when he lived in Los Angeles, and the hidden attributes like paper streets that made these objects so unique.
Shot by Adam Savage and edited by Norman Chan
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Back in the 1990s I worked about half a mile from Thomas Maps. If you brought a damaged map book to them, the receptionist would collect the replacement pages from stock and using a binding machine reinsert them in your book. This was a free service.
Did you work at Art Supply Warehouse? It was down the street from the Tomas Guide. The covers for the Thomas Guides was a custom paper there and they were on the same street. I’m old enough to remember getting my own Thomas guide, it was the original google maps
I remember thier office near John Wayne, used to go to Pro Photo all the time!
@@davidgutting4317 No. I worked at Lear Siegler Energy Products Division at Redhill and Dyer. If the business had not folded, I would probably still be there. Best employer I ever had, roll models from the greatest generation for a young engineer.
It was my driving bible. 80s and 90s, I picked up spare cash doing messenger and delivery work. My first after school job in high school was delivering alcohol for a liquor store. Then I did messenger work for attorneys in when I was in college. After college I worked as a PA.
Thomas Bros. Maps were accurate. Give me an address and I could find it 99% of the time.
I also worked down the street from Thomas Bros Maps. I was on Fitch back in 1993. I remember when they got purchase by Rand Mcnally. I had the book for LA, Orange County and San Diego. My mom and dad used the Thomas Guides for Real Estate. All the MLS listings used the grid system.
You can go to the Thomas Bros. offices in CA. They have these books of map pages that are fascinating to flip through.
So, in a Thomas Bros. Guide, each page has a letter and a number corresponding to that page's placement in a massive grid map of the city. Like, A8 or B2 or whatever. Well, if you go to their HQ you can flip through the Book of B2 for instance. Which is AMAZING because that page, B2 has *always* shown the same plot of land. Ever since they started making maps 100+ years ago.
So when you flip through the Book of B2, you see a literal time lapse of that part of the city, going backward in time. You can see all the development happening, all the places that came and went.
Seems like the kind of thing Adam would love.
That's so cool
Oh, my word, they truly ARE a national treasure!
You can get a similar effect with old USGS topos and airial photography
The London taxi training is actually called "doing the Knowledge". Like you say, you'll see guys on mopeds with plywood clipboards fitted to the handle bars, out in all weathers - learning the street names. The London equivilent to the Thomas Guide is the "A-to-Z" created by Phyllis Pearsall in the 1930's. Pearsall claimed that the work involved walking 3,000 miles to check the names of 23,000 streets, waking up at 5am every morning, and not going to bed until after an 18-hour working day.
Love the A to Z. Was always in my bag, along with my tube pass, when I lived in London in the late 90s.
'Doing the Knowledge' appears currently to be under threat as the Power that Be (TFL) consider changes to the system to improve take up of the 'Black Cab' license. What this will entail remains to be seen.
Also, the A-to-Z has Trap Streets.
Trap Streets are the official UK term for what Adam called "Paper Streets".
I remember watching Tony from the BBC "Up" documentaries doing the Knowledge when he became a cabbie. Just as you said, he spent hours a day for months (if not a few years) taking his moped and clipboard around town learning the streets, popular destinations, and how traffic patterns changed through the day.
The idea of a "trap street" was an important plot point in the Doctor Who episode, "Face the Raven."
Not Thomas Maps story but a map story: I too moved to SF in 1990. Before leaving Boston I went to AAA and got a triptik map. They were a brilliant idea. They were narrow linear maps in that they followed the freeways across the US. You would describe your route to the map person and they would go to this wall of cubby holes and pull out the various pages needed for your trip and put together a custom route map for you and then bind it. It showed towns, places to eat and sleep and crossroads. It wasn't til decades later that I learned this was how Romans mapped their world! They made long narrow maps of a road that showed towns, landmarks, crossroads and distance markers. The user would know how long and what to expect along the way even if they did not know anything a mile past the road on either side. Just like my triptik. I still have it.
OMG, I *loved* Trip Tiks! They were fantastic for planning out cross-country trips. They would show locations of exits and roadside stops, plus is exits had fuel or restaurants nearby. I would plan out how far I wanted to drive in one day, then look for the closest roadside stop or hotel to that point. Also, I could pre-plan fuel stops. Before I left home, I knew exactly how many days it would take to drive to my destination. I used these a lot in the 1980s.
That style of map survived the Romans directly and carried on far into the middle ages. Most people only ever saw linear maps, except perhaps for some Mappa Mundi displayed by the local church or lord. I had no idea the style originated in ancient Rome, but i'm not surprised.
My father was very proud of his AAA membership, and I remember that we would go there to get a TripTik for all our summer driving vacations when I was growing up. I got to sit shotgun and act as navigator reverently following the highlighted route. When I was 19 I took a solo trip from Southern California to Seattle and my dad solemnly presented me with my very own Triple A membership and a TripTik of my driving route. The map was very cool and in several places had route options depending on the time of day you were going to be in a place. If it was between say 3 PM and 6PM, take road 375 (highlighted by hand in orange) otherwise continue on road 37 (highlighted in yellow). Such great memories.
never heard of triptik maps, but that sounds awesome
I love being a professional cartographer, specifically the challenge of clearly, accurately, and attractively conveying the desired spatial information to the end user. I find it incredibly rewarding that nearly half a million people have picked up my maps at information kiosks to help them find their way (and I keep my trap roads off the beaten path). As one elderly gentleman from Houston once told me, "I have met more astronauts than cartographers!"
Trap roads seem to be the official name of Adam's "paper streets". Thanks for both including the name and not calling Adam out on it :)
Great story. What is your map product? I worked at the USGS in their main GIS division for 7 years and met dozens of cartographers. Never met an astronaut.
@@johnpombrio You're close. Paper street and “traps” on maps are indeed distinct things. What Adam is describing are what I’d call a trap. Paper streets are more of an artifact of the odd way old road maps were created and updated, pulling planing materials in from developers and city building departments, often before the actual streets were built. If a development changed after the map was made, or if the development failed altogether, those streets on the map become paper streets because they exist only on the paper map now. But they weren’t really created to protect the IP of the cartographer.
Cartographer high-five. I worked at the UK's Ordnance Survey for 23 years, 10 of them literally hand drawing maps before we went digital.
@@johnpombrio Being Canadian, I simply assumed that the term was either American or coined by the people at Thomas themselves!
New England Directions : "Come to think of it.... you can't get there from here...."
I grew up in a tiny New England town! Man, I can find my way through the whole county on unmarked dirt roads. Throw me into a city with a dang grid pattern and Im totally lost 😂
Classic Irish directions: "You wanna be where now? Oooh, I wouldn't start from here."
SO TRUE! I live in a rural touristy area, and have had someone argue with me about how long it would take to get to the next town over. Yes, on the map they look quite close, but there are *no roads* directly between them , because there are several lakes in between. She continued to argue with me, and I said she is welcome to try and find out 😂
Make sure you say that with a down-east accent !
My dad was a paramedic in the largest county in Minnesota for 40 years. He had one of those spiral bound maps in his bag and got a new one every year. He tells stories of new medics that marveled at his ability to get from point A to point B without GPS. He would hand them his map and they were wholly confused. To this day, 8 years retired, he can tell me exactly how to get somewhere from memory.
s/o to MN!
I think they've done neurological studies and brain imaging on taxi drivers, and they've found that the region of the brain for getting around was enlarged. I'd expect that's true of you're Father was well.
I was in the Army Reserve back in the 90's. For 4 years, we did all our field training exercises at Camp Grayling, Michigan. During my fifth year, we had some soldiers from another unit attached to our squad. My Platoon Sargeant decided to test his knowledge of Camp Grayling. He had one of the transfered troops drive while he rode in the back while he looked up from the back of the Hummer. For two weeks, he was able to successfully navigate the backwoods tank trails of Camp Grayling just by looking up at the tree tops of each tank trail junction.
I live in a rural area with a volunteer fire department. Sometimes addresses aren't even needed. If you say there's a fire at Johnsons on road 24 everyone knows where it is
People don't know that Western US cities are laid out on a grid system that determines a property's address. Or about the statewide "township and range" survey lines. Or the signals hidden in street terminology. Granted, in cities like Seattle, none of that will get you very far unless you also have a firm grasp of the city's natural topography and the arcane details of how maybe not the best people for the job tried to implement said grid system(s) on said topography.
So, if you can figure that out, and have a Thomas Guide (which will help you understand that tremendously), you can find any address just by looking up the streets, finding an address block reference on the street, and counting.
This is one of my favorite episodes! No product placement, no guests, no real plan, other than to explain a passion for something unique and cool. As a dude who drove around with a map from state to state, this was pretty awesome.
Well, Adam DID have a sip of Snapple. If that’s product placement, it’s tasteful and subtle.
I was a kid born and raised in LA county through the 80's and 90's. My dad got a new Thomas Guide every year for X-Mas because he worked as a courier in LA, delivering scripts and other items to studios and all manner of celebrity (Robert Zemeckis, Richard Simmons, George C. Scott, the list goes on and on) and he got to a point where he had the Thomas Guide emblazoned in his brain. So much so, that i started driving in the early 00's I would often seek out call boxes or payphones when I got lost, and would call him, tell him where i was by street and nearest cross street, and in a lot of cases he'd say something like "okay, go down two blocks to the Chevron and make a left" or "you need to head back where you were coming six blocks, you'll see a Taco Bell on the North West corner, make a left there, it'll be Cahuenga Blvd, turn there and go down until you see the , then make a right another two blocks and you're there". The Thomas Guide was the most revered book in our house, because it helped keep food on the table and the lights turning on. Eventually he bought me my own Thomas guide as a birthday gift and told me to learn to use it so he'd worry less about me getting lost and I wouldn't have to call him so much. I miss those maps, and the feel of the paper under my fingers as a searched out my route on whatever adventure my late teen/early twenty self was embarking on.
It's official, Adam is that family member, faculty, teacher, professor or someone in a similar way that can tell you a story about anything, be way off topic and you come away still having learned something you never knew.
You were also grateful he did.
Like that teacher that affected your like so much you never forget their name..
Adam, 1993 was my first full year in Los Angeles as a PA working for the Film & TV biz. I put 40k miles on my car in 1 year without ever leaving LA as a PA. I would have never survived without the Thomas Guide. At the end of that year, you could tell me almost any 2 cross streets and I could tell you the fastest way there. My wife wanted me to throw out my old Thomas Guides, and I told her absolutely not! I'm still attached to them!
Orientation and map-reading are such important skills.
I loved being the "co-pilot" reading the map, calculating where's the next exit or stop, giving info at the right time, looking for the next radio station...
I worked as a courier from 86 - 89. Every year I bought a new Thomas Guide. I still remember page 44 was Downtown LA. That was the page that always ripped out just from so much use. Those guides back in the day were very valuable. As good as gold.
Love a good map!! A few years ago, when I was in college, a few friends and I went to a nearby cave that was a popular place for students to explore. We derped around the cave a while, got some minor claustrophobia, had a good time, and went home.
That night, I was looking at satellite imagery of the area surrounding the cave, which led me to some forest service maps of the area, and I got a random inkling to copy it all down and make a homemade map, extending from the main road, to the cave, and then of the cave's path itself (the cave is about 0.75 miles long).
I spent a while on that map, making it look nice, have the correct symbols on it, and making it accurate, even tracing footpaths from my monitor. For only having made maps a few times in my life, I was pretty proud of it once I was done. I folded it up and stuck it in my wallet, just cause I wanted to carry it around with me and bask in its cool map-ness.
A few days later, I went to a party, and my fellow spelunkers were there. I was talking to one of them about the mini-adventure we had, and along our conversation she says
'I wish I had a map of that area, that would be so cool, with the cave on it and everything." And I was like "Lord Almighty guess what I have in my pocket right now."
I pulled out the map (which had the perfect amount of aesthetic creases from being in my wallet for a few days), and handed it to her. The look on her face was this unbridled mixture of amazement and excitement, and she asks if I made it, and I said I did, and man, I must've seemed like an actual wizard in that moment. Probably the coolest thing I've ever done, if we're being honest.
This just unlocked a core memory for me. As a kid growing up in Orange County in the 90s, I used to have fun playing with my dad's Thomas Guide. I would just sit, pick an arbitrary address, and see if I could navigate there from my house. I would also find the addresses for my friends, relatives, etc., throughout OC and LA and "explore" the areas around their houses. Easily spent countless hours doing this.
A few points: one--those fake streets they list will mess you up if you're an explorer. More than once I was up in the mountains somewhere and counting on a road to return and---it's not there! Two--the Thomas Guide still shows details that you cannot find on Google Maps or anywhere else. Three--if you like those books, you owe it to yourself to get a set of maps from Auto Club of Southern California. The ACSC maps are a pure art-form in themselves. Stunning detail, clear communication of the area through consistent symbology and styles. I hope someday they are converted to digital form because they are too nice to lose. They cover all the counties from Tulare-south. They also have national park maps for Death Valley, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc, regional maps for the San Bernardino Mountains, Palm Springs and the Colorado River area. The absolute pinnacle of their maps is Indian Country. Get a copy.
Often that's not a fake road but a road that has disappeared since the map was made. You would be surprised how fast 'permanent' structures can be broken apart and covered over by nature. Paper maps are dated even before they are printed (this is true of digital maps as well, but people find it hard to believe actual people register those lines that appear on their screen).
If you're ever in Boston, go up to Cambridge. About halfway between Harvard and Porter there's a store called Ward Maps. It's full of old maps and associated paraphanalia. They sell both actual old maps, but they also make reproductions and I think they'll make you a reproduction of any map they have in their inventory (as long as it's out of copyright). Also, the Library of Congress has digitized the insanely detailed Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps , which cover a good chunk of the country.
Interesting-thanks
The station maps at MBTA stations are some kind of enameled steel, and when they are updated, sometimes they use stickers but other times they rip out those steel maps and wardmaps sells them! I have one hanging on my wall, it's like 5 feet square
@@metagoat In the mid/late 80s, I lived in southie, next to Broadway station (aka the wild west back then, not now). They were ripping the old above-ground station down-one night staggering home, I grabbed the big BROADWAY sign off the wall-very nice enameled steel, covered with "Patrick loves Denise" graffiti. High-art! My brother still has it. ;)
As I am from NH, I can't get there from here. I can't go UP to Cambridge. I can go Down to the Fair City.
Watching your video today I'm filled with two grand memories. My father worked construction all over Southern California in the 1960s-90's, literally building Orange County and the Inland Empire before there was anything there including the roads. I have Thomas Guides with huge blank areas filled roads drawn in pencil by him that they built so they could find their way to new job sites. I used these map books when I began to drive in So Cal, books filled with my fathers lines and notes. Dad has been gone for 17 years now and I covet these books. Another is the book Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you haven't read it, I recommend it for you.
What a wonderful treasure to have of your dad ❤
That is a beautiful treasure and family heirloom tied to the history of a whole community.
You are so right, I drove a cab in Chula Vista, National City, and Imperial Beach in 1981, and the Thomas Guide was a lifesaver, even though I grew up in that area. The Thomas Guide also had streets that were planned and not completed. I miss having a real map in my car, in places like LA and San Diego you only need to update your Thomas Guide about every 5 years, and only if you needed to get to new streets that were added. To say I have fond memories is an understatement.
My first thought was a 1" grid battle map....but these maps also are awesome. I remember my Dad going to AAA and getting a TripTik just to know about construction and then using his own atlas to draw out our routes. I'd find him looking over it again and again during the weeks coming up to our vacation, sometimes with an "Aha!" about finding some cool new way to go which might be even better! Great work Adam, I'm going to look for some old maps of where I live in Portland, OR because I know it has changed over the years. Powell Blvd almost became a new Interstate, which would very much would have changed this neighborhood. Great work, keep it up!
Oh the memories of my youth rushing back to my head thinking of the anticipation of flipping the pages of the triptik on summer vacation trips. My dad probably kept all of them somewhere in his desk... Gotta find those on my next visit home. 😊
In the early mid 00s and into the early teens my mom worked as a sales rep for a stone countertop company that sold countertops through Home Depot and Lowes. As such she travelled all around southern California from the high desert down to San Diego, from 29 palms to thousand oaks and all the beaches between there and SD. Every home Depot or Lowe's in socal my mom would drive to and supply stone samples. She absolutely swore by her Thomas Guides. And after spending some time with her a couple times on her travels I was amazed by how easy and intuitive using them was.
I was going to post a similar comment. My dad was a business owner and salesman who traveled to people's homes as well. He relied on Thomas guides too, and I learned how to use them from him, and was even his navigator every now and again. Haven't touched one in years of course, and as I started driving myself, the ability to go online and get printed directions from a website was becoming more of a thing, so I didn't have to rely on them as much, but I definitely had one in my car and did use it a few times.
It was great until you got to the end of a section and had to jump 30 pages or went north or south of your page.
I had a graveyard shift delivery job in LA for years in the early 2000s and every night we had to set our route to about 25-35 locations via Thomas Guide and we even had to pass a Thomas Guide test before we could get hired!
To this day I regularly use paper maps and a road atlas whenever possible. There is something about, as you say, the situational awareness of it. I dont care how big a screen it is you have, its not the same as holding a map in your hands. I will never give that up. Thomas Guides forever!
I appreciate your comment. I have always taken wandering road trips on motorcycles or in my Sprinter van and the ability to see DETAILED views of the roads, terrain, and sites in large (300 square miles or more) areas ensures that you don't blindly drive past interesting roads, small rivers, and places. You can also map out backroads ( used to be referred to as 'blue routes' because most maps used to indicate backroads that are connecting roads with light blue color lines) connecting across a large area, which is especially important for finding the great windy roads you want to ride motorcycles on.
Not los Angeles, but my wife used to buy the latest rand McNally map for Chicago and burbs every year because she was self employed and had to drive to all sorts of businesses so I remember how important that map book was to always be in her car because her job depended on it. When we got our first gps device around 2000 I remember what an incredible game changer this was going to be.. putting in an address and it would take you there. Of course back then we still had to manually update the maps (pay money for updates), and forget about live traffic. We are all spoiled now not only having gps in our phone, but maps that are always up to date with traffic updates and a gps that will suggest a new route to avoid traffic.
Here in Brazil we had "Guia Quarto Rodas" (Four wheels guide). Quatro Rodas was a normal car's magazine, but they decided to make those map grides as well. The system was very similar to this Thomas Guide. The difference is that it was popular in the whole country, of course they had a lot of different versions for different parts of the country.
I received a degree in Graphic Design in Orange County in the late '90s. While searching for jobs, Thomas Maps was one of the top of my list. The combination of visual communication along with precise land surveying was very appealing to me. Sadly, this was running towards the end of their run, and the switch to digital was beginning. I have designed a few maps for clients throughout my career, but I always regretted not having the chance to work for the premiere guide.
As a cartographer it is wonderful to see yours and others loves of maps.
As a Southern Californian I was gifted my very own circa 2000/01 Thomas Guide when I moved into the dorms for college, and I used it for a handful of years prior to the ubiquity of GPS. I have vivid memories of my parents using them throughout my childhood, as well as being taught how to navigate using one in my adolescence. They had editions kicking around that dated back into the early '70s when they first began to drive.
The London equivalent of the Thomas Guide would be the "A-Z" or "The Geographer's A-Z Street Atlas," and if you have an interest in old street maps I thoroughly encourage looking into the maps themselves and the company that makes them, which was founded in 1936 by a wonderfully eccentric woman by the name of Phyllis Pearsall.
In the Dallas/Fort Worth area we had Mapsco, which looks like it was an equivalent system. My father was a travelling salesman and as kids we were expected to learn how to use the map to help with directions when we went out with him. Dallas was the green book and Ft. Worth was red and knowing which suburb was covered in which book was a key skill. Good memories! While I don't lament the existence of nav apps there is something intimate that is lost in the non-permanent digital world.
I too am from the same DFW metro. We sometimes bought a new edition every year due to the numerous neighborhoods popping up around us. When you had a party you only need to tell your friends what page you were on in the current copy and the exact square on the page, such as page 134, C6, and then your exact street address and it was pretty easy to find your way there. If it was really far I would make a note of which page to turn to each time you "drove off" the page . 😉😀
As usual, Adam, your genuine, unironic enthusiasm is a joy to witness.
Moving to LA from London in the 80s, I was used to the London A-Z map book, so grabbing my first Thomas Guide was like going from a portable black-and-white TV to a color console TV! I navigated all over LA with the Thomas Guide, it lived under my seat at all times ready to go. It was so much easier to handle than the fold-out maps from AAA! I did have to buy new updated editions once in a while as new streets were built. Seeing your copy on screen brought back so many memories.
I worked for Thomas Bros. in the late 80s-early 90s. (There was an actual retail store in DTLA). Few people know that there was a Thomas Guide for ALL cities in California, and the major metro areas of Oregon and Washington. Not only that, but every Guide was also available as a wall map! Each map was about 4'x6', roll-up, laminated, and had EVERY street that the "book" form did (yes, including all of the "fake" streets, inserted to prevent copyright infringement). Really quite impressive!
We moved from Orange County to near Seattle in 2000. We immediately bought the WA and Puget Sound editions! Still have them, AS WELL AS the last CA, LA, and Orange County editions we had before moving.
THE Thomas guide was my go to tool when I was a taxi driver for a short while and during that time I fell in LOVE with it. Yes, the technology has helped in find your way but the completeness of the Thomas guide was unparalleled.
I do love a printed map.
My problem with a device map for navigation is the lack of the wider view with the same detail. When out walking with my OS map (UK) I can see where I am, where I am going and everything in between with all the information necessary immediately visible. To get the same effect as my phone I need to cut the sheet into 2 inch squares. 🙂
Agreed. Walkers should always take a paper map as well as any hand-held device. Paper doesn't run out of battery life, network or satellite signal.
Re-reading my comment has reminded me that I have a set of OS derived maps that are indeed cut up into sections about the size of a credit card. They were waterproof and a standard 1/50000 landranger map was reduced to about 10 to 15 double sided cards I think.
Viewed using a fold out magnifier which also doubled as a carry case. Two full maps and case would easily fit into a shirt pocket.
Interesting but almost completely impractical and unusable in the field compared to a folded paper map.😄
I grew up in a rural area. Every year in the mail you would get a county map book/phone directory. The maps had dots for every house and the resident's name.
You’re not the only one. I love maps especially old maps and historical atlases.
When on vacation I only navigate by map. Only when I’m on the highway, I use the electronic navigation.
I'm a former map librarian and a Gen-Xer. Definitely a fan and user of paper maps, though usually as a backup. BTW, I highly recommend The Cartographers, a fascinating story involving the fake towns that early cartographers put in their maps.
I've worked in GIS since the mid 80s and am enthralled and amazed by the incredible advances in geographic technology during this time. It's been a blessing to be part of it. However, I still love an artfully produced paper map and can stare at a good one for hours. Ironically, many millions of dollars have been spent on software that can produce high quality paper maps. Street name placement is particularly difficult. I lived in Redlands and worked for ESRI for a time an yes, the TB map book was legend. It was quite the coup when ESRI acquired the TB account and that partnership really drove the development of digital cartography.
What a trip down memory lane. I still have my SF Bay Area Thomas guide I used when I was a cable installer in the 90's. I had no navigator so I pre planned my route in a comp book and used it like an O.G. map quest with L, R and stop signs. Aahh the good Ol' days. 😂 ❤
My mom found an old road atlas of our hometown of Kansas City from 1966. It's fascinating looking at how things have changed since then, but also equally amazing what things are the same.
One of the first questions in getting directions to a new location was to ask what page the destination is on. Often, people knew exactly which page they were on and could judge how far of a drive was ahead by the page number. I think I went through three or four Thomas Guides while I was raised there.
I remember businesses having their page number and grid reference on their advertising.
I remember using AAA TripTiks to get around if you had time to wait for them to mail them to you, or you had to go into a AAA office to get them. Multiple maps for long trips were not uncommon. They would put together an entire package of all kinds of maps just to travel long distances.
I was a cable TV guy in Los Angeles County back in the 80s and I lived by my Thomas Guide. I'd wear one out in less than a year from heavy use.
Listening to you babble on is legitimately the highlight of my day! It’s amazing to hear your thoughts and passion for everything you talk about.
Oh man, Adam, I felt this in my gut. I started driving in LA in 85 and I could not have survived without the Thomas Brothers Guide. When you did the reveal, I could actually smell the pages again. The ink and coating had a subtle but distinct odor.
I was moved to tears when you brought the Guide. It was my go-to resource for driving in LA/OC, second only to AAA for driving outside the county. I used to purchase it at Price Club and always made sure to have the latest version. I would study the routes and then set off driving, stopping to reference it again as needed. Of course, with the advent of Garmin, Thomas Guide became obsolete. But during its time, it was a prized possession. Thank you for sharing it with us.
I sooo relate to this…. I was born and raised in LA County. I remember my dad having a 1970s Thomas Guide in the car. It was a right of passage the day he showed my sister and I how to use it so we could help navigate. If you were truly prepared you “preworked” your route and wrote it down before even getting into the car.
I got my driver’s license in 1992 and was given a band new Thomas Guide as a gift. I loved it.
Thank you for taking me down some memories I didn’t even know I had.
I spent over 20 years driving Central/Southern California. I had a Thomas Guide for every County from San Luis Obispo to San Diego. After learning about them, my friend and I would blindfold one of us and the other would drive to somewhere in LA County. The blindfolded one then had to get clues from street signs and landmarks, then give directions to get back to a known place. It really helped when getting directions from customers. "Just give me the address and a nearby cross street. I will find you." Worked every time. (On a side note: I remember driving to South Exa Court in Carson, Ca to verify that there really was a North & South Exa Ct. North is now gone, and South has lost it's compass part. It's just Exa Ct now. But we young guys loved the fact that S Exa Ct was a fast one pulled over the city's eyes.)
I picked up an world atlas from 1936. So cool to see countries that are named differently today. You can see history.
I have a globe from every decade from 1910 through 1980. It is amazing how cheap they are if you look online. Most of mine came from old schools nearby. My sons can date them by which countries were independent or renamed. Thanks Myanmar and East Pakistan.
@@mikealbrecht3990 Ooo! That sounds fun. I enjoy looking at globes/maps to see whether it has recently formed countries. Random memory, but I remember growing up with a world map placemat and having questions about why Hong Kong was labeled as a part of the UK. My parents didn’t really have a good answer and now that I know more of the history of the British Empire and China, I don’t really blame my parents for not being able to explain it. Also I think Hong Kong would have just stopped being under British control at that time, so political lines may have been in flux, further complicating things
Anyway, thanks for reading my ramblings 😅
I still have my original 1998 Seattle Thomas Guide I got when I was 18 years old in the back of my Jeep to this day. I used it daily for years! I'm great with it. Still use it for fun occasionally. Looong time fan, would love to just shake your hand one day. 👍😎
I was born and raised in OC, California in 1986 and have very fond memories of riding around in the back seat of my dad's car with no other entertainment than the Thomas Guide. I would follow along, turning to the different pages as we drove. I had our home street highlighted, his office in Carson, my grandmother's house in Palos Verdes. I know this has to be where my love of maps and excellent sense of direction comes from today. So happy to see the love of things like this.
No way 😳 another Cody born in Orange County in 1986?
Did you ever go to Cambridge Elementary and go by Ziggy at all?
Another staple in mapping history: For people in southern California or Texas planning a road trip into Mexico, a stop at Sanborn's Mexico Auto Insurance was a must before crossing the border. They would sell you your required Mexican auto insurance and then inquire where you were going in Mexico (which for me was always ALL the way south to the Yucatan Peninsula). Then they would generously provide you with all the appropriate road maps that you would need to get to your destination and mark the best rout for you. They had excellent maps and while I would often get temporarily lost or turned around it was my fault and not the maps. They safely guided me across Mexico on multiple occasions.
In Maine, it was the Delorme Atlas & Gazetteer. It was the best thing available for navigating across the state or inside our little cities. But it also went into the backcountry, waterways, mountains, etc. For a while, it was the best map off any kind I had ever seen. It may be my favorite book ever, in fact. I still get nostalgic about it. It was a way to make discoveries and to get places. Everyone had one, and everyone had their own margin notes & highlighted routes. They eventually expanded to other states. But those were late comers so didn't have the level of detail and info that had been built up in the Maine edition for so many years. I kept one in my car for years after MapQuest. But as amazing as that was for its time, for me, paper maps have moved out of the realm of useful tools and into the classes of treasured historical artworks and apocalypse supplies.
For a while DeLorme got into navigation software, before it became this completely commoditized thing. My sister-in-law worked for them for a while near Portland.
I've spent many hours looking at the New York version. I can actually see it from where I'm sitting. But I don't remember the last time I opened it.
I delivered flowers for 18 months in San Diego, CA in '89-'90. The Thomas Guide was our BIBLE and we could NOT do our jobs without them. Also, your assertion about the questionable parentage of thieves that would steal your Thomas Guide was spot on!
I found five routes - Hwy 1, Hwy 101, I-5, CA-99, and Hwy-395. I still have my whole set of Thomas guides that road around with me for YEARS! Loved those things! I remember my folks giving me a copy with my first car!
My dad used to do the maps for Thomas Guides. They were so inaccurate which bothered him so much. Their deadlines were so unrealistic that he was told to just leave the errors in and move on.
Copyright errors are used in maps to detect plagiarism.
@@user.A9 I never mentioned what kind of errors. Your reply is ridiculous anyway.
I grew up in Melbourne, Australia. Our map of choice (and there really wasn't much competition) was the Melways. Every car in our family (and at one point there were probably up to ten cars in the driveway) had its own Melways. I still remember the map number that my house was located (20) even though I haven't lived there in over 30 years. Good to know that this map obsession wasn't just me and my family, and that other cities throughout the world (and the people that inhabit them) had the same obsession. Thanks Adam!
I popped into the comments to see if anyone referenced the Melways! Definitely a Victorian icon :)
I love that you have the 1993 version there. In 1993 I was a delivery driver in Portland, Or. I used the Thomas Guide to find addresses and plan my route for the day. It was absolutely indispensable.
I was a cab driver in the 80s. Rand McNally Street finder is what we used. Big soft-cover spiral bound book
As a 23 year-old, my closest experience to this is the printed off MapQuest pages when I was like 5 😂 so this is amazing to learn about!
I grew up giving my dad directions with a Thomas Guide in L.A. Great memories and I happily blame you for my recent eBay purchase of a Thomas Guide! So thank you. I forgot all about them until your video. I still have a paper city map in my glovebox because it feels good to have a back up map of some kind. Even if its a bit out of date and never used. Its a good luck charm now. And this is my first comment on any video ever! I know, I know… no lie. The honor is yours. Cheers!
Great video Adam! I worked for a television repair and sales shop in Marin County in the 70s and the three things you always had to carry with you was your toolbox, your caddy of vacuum tubes and of course a well-worn, dogeared Thomas Brothers guide to Marin County. While I didn't get the same burned in memory as a London taxi driver, to this day I can still remember how to find certain obscure streets and navigate shortcuts across Marin's valley-laced geography, something which I dont think i would have today if we had GPS devices in the 70s.
In the mid 70s-80s I worked with an uncle and drove the LA area picking up parts. The Thomas maps were indispensable. I found myself writing instructions on a legal pad, exit here, count this number of blocks, look for address. All because maps don't account for stolen street signs. My joy was acquiring a world atlas from the 1940s,each state,many countries pre inter state. Looking at old routes long gone. Nephews visiting Arizona were going to an area where cell service is spotty. Trying to be helpful I offered a state atlas, tongue in cheek the response......"we don't need no stinking map, we have GPS. " live and learn. Enjoyed the video. RF
Not LA, but my wife was a real estate appraiser in the early 2000s and I worked for AT&T as a field tech. We always had a Pierson's Guide (pretty much the same as a Thomas Guide). They were awesome! We both got really good at them.
In the early 2000’s I worked as an apprentice electrician for a service department in the Dallas / Ft Worth area. We used a MapsCo to get around, from site to site. As the apprentice one of my main task of the day was to “navigate” to each site. We (seasoned) electricians were just talking about this exact subject last week. How it used to be a real skill to be able to navigate the back roads and short cuts through the MapsCo. Now a days, you just text an address to someone, and they don’t even have to type it in… just click on it and it automatically pulls up on your favorite way finding tool…
Thanks for the video. I appreciate your excitement of the use of such a great tool.
I have that exact Thomas Guide!!! I was shaking yes through the whole video! I want to give this more than one thumbs up!
So one story I have about using that guide: My wife, then girlfriend was at a craft show in Woodland Hills and my mother was coming up from Orange County. She was given directions to go up the 5 but not given good directions to the 101. She ended up above LA and I had to sit on the phone using the guide trying to direct her to Woodland Hills. I did finally manage to get her there but man I spent a good hour and a half flipping through that guide!
What FUN!!!!!
When I got my license and first car in LA County in 2001 my dad made sure I had a Thomas Guide. I delivered pizza for years and used it all the time before GPS and smartphones became a thing. I love that I have older parents and have one foot in the past and one foot in the future for reasons like these.
I used to live in the San Fernando Valley from 89-93. I had 2 reasons to covet my Thomas Guide map;
#1 - I worked at Michael J's Pizza in Sherman Oaks as a delivery driver. Half of my deliveries were up in those hills between Sepulveda and Van Nuys. The guide was indispensable.
#2 - I was an avid street skater. We would hear about spots around the Valley, or in Santa Monica, or Thousand Oaks and that book got a lot of play. We would even use it to look for likely hidden skate spots, drainage ditches, shipping delivery docks, schools that might have embankments, etc.
I think using physical maps, honing the creation of mental pictures and trusting them enough to send you into unknown territory is a powerful experience, awesome skill and exercise to train for many other things in life. Kids these days... are probably out there on my lawn!
Thank you again for another fun enthusiastic video.
We moved from Orange County to near Seattle in 2000. We immediately bought the WA and Puget Sound editions! Still have them and they remain in the cars! You never know. AND we still have the last CA, LA, and Orange County editions we had before moving. I think I’ll gig them out and look at them again. I used to annotate them in pen, marking places I went often.
Also, was in grad school in Leeds, England in the late 1970’s. I had the A to Z for Leeds and Bradford. I was (am) a Social Worker and made home visits using Public Transport. The A to Z was invaluable. I don’t remember how I figured out the bus routes.
Not LA, but when I moved to the SF Bay Area in 1999, everyone had a Thomas guide and as soon as I got my car I immediately bought one too. As everyone else here has shared, I couldn't have survived driving around here without it. Looking up how to get there before going, stopping on the side of the road when something went awry, and in that final moment before smartphones took over, I can remember stopping on the side of the road and using the light from my flip phone to see the guide. It still lived in my car until 2018 when I bought a new car and finally put it to rest. I'm not exactly nostalgic for it, but it is 100% a visceral memory whenever I (like this video!) see one displayed. :) Thanks Adam!
In 1997-1998 my mother and I did truck driving and we had a Thomas Guide for Los Angeles when we were there. It was such a great tool to use for truck drivers. Sure, wish we still had that book of maps.
As a So Cal truck driver for the last 35 years these were an absolute must, I couldn't do my job without them. I still have them all dating back to 1988.
I talked to a model maker who worked on the prototype of Furby. It was made in RI, and he accompanied it to the inventor who lived up one of those canyons. He said there was only one FedEx driver that could find his way there.
I had to watch this because of the nostalgia I had over all my Thomas Guides. I still have some.. somewhere. I remember getting lost all the time without maps. I remember getting lost all the time WITH maps. Thank god for my phone that plugs into my car that displays a HUGE map that shows be where to go. They have saved lives.
That being said, when I went camping in the Yosemite Wilderness, a real map and a compass were truly vital tools.
Holy cow! I saw the thumbnail and had to watch. I moved to Los Angeles in 1992 and was a film/TV post engineer for Dolby Labs and my job was to drive around town and work with dubbing stages to do their setup/mastering for various Dolby Surround technology. I LIVED on the Thomas Guide. I always had the previous edition and the latest edition just in case I lost one. To this day, I occasionally habitually reach around to that pocket in the back of the passenger's seat and suffer a millisecond. mpanic not feeling the outline of the Thomas Guide where it ought to be.
I moved to the Seattle area in 2000 to go to school. For the first few months, my best friend was my Thomas Guide. I would pick a random place and find my way there to learn my way around and meet people. Such a great throwback video
Part of the joy of road trips was seeing where you were, where you are going, and the areas in between. I learned how to read maps at an early age and would pore over the atlas at breakfast time. A tiny screen can’t give you the same perspective that a paper map can.
Fascinating. As an old bastard, I can read a map just fine. I was in the Army in the 1980's and can still read a Topo map and drive a compass like a champ. I love the bit about the paper streets in the Thomas Guide.
Would love to see Adam discuss the US Forest Service maps. They are incredibly detailed and show some wonderful places you just don't see in other resources.
I used to drive a taxi in the 90's in LA/San Fernando Valley for Valley Cab as one of my first jobs. That Thomas Guide was my bible. I wonder now if I still have it or threw it away. Such a great invention.
East Coast guy here, from Richmond Virginia and we had ADC Map book's in our area. Or just simply known as the Map Book. I'm 42 year's old and truck drove in the metro Richmond area for 12 years.
I had gotten to be a map reading expert. I could look up an address, find it in the book, memorize it, close the book and take off. In the mid 2000's when dash mounted GPS became popular, I still used a map book for around town. And went to the GPS for out of town driving.
Even today with Google maps loaded on my cellphone, I can look up an address and drive to it, usually without much problem.
I've lived in LA since 1984. I've had a couple Thomas Guides, at least one being stolen out of my car like you said. I NEVER liked them. They were good for finding obscure streets. But I MUCH preferred the big, fold-out AAA/Gas Station maps where you could see pretty much all of LA all at once, and really SEE the vector of your trip. It was impossible to understand the nature of a big street like Santa Monica or Wilshire Bl. when you have to flip 6 pages to get from downtown to the beach. When the iPhone was invented, I thought - nah, I don't really need that. But then a friend had one, and he showed me the zoomable map with the blue dot where you are, and the red lines to show traffic jams (!!) and I was sold. Mind Blown.
As a trucker in the east coast, a good, up to date, paper atlas is a MUST for me. Not only does it help find routes that might be problematic for a normal GPS, but the truck specific ones even list restricted routes and low clearances, which is incredibly important for a truck drive.
As good as GPS systems are getting, having a good solid paper atlas is still so important, because GPS systems to crash or become confused, which can lead to people getting lost or into bad situations. So while it may seem archaic in this age of high tech solutions, sometimes, a little bit of common sense and old school knowledge can really come in handy!
Late 80's early 90's for me. The Thomas Guide was a MUST have and you have the right one. Los Angeles and Orange county. I don't know what I would have done without one. Great video as always.
I worked in the cartographic department at Pacific Bell in SF, in the late 80s, early 90s, working on the local access pages for the Directories, The Thomas Guides were indispensable and sometimes fought over while we made our maps (all Mac office-Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Freehand).
I learned using Freehand by the time when it was by Macromedia. I'm still missing it, and the workflow it provided - such a nice straightforward tool! :)
@@3.kFreehand had layers before Illustrator, so we used that for the maps; as soon Illustrator got layers we jumped over to that. Freehand was a really good product!
I lived in Orange County for several years, including 1993. What I remember, and what Adam doesn't mention, is that if you had to go somewhere new on Wednesday, you would sit down with the Thomas Guide Tuesday night and, depending on the complexity of the route, spend as much as an hour figuring out how to get there. And oh, how fun it was to be tracing your route down a street to the edge of the page, then have to jump 20 pages to pick up your route again! When I moved back to Dallas a couple of years later, I would have to do the same exercise with the trusty MapsCo. Good times!
Absolutely loved the Thomas Guide when I was a residential delivery driver in the late 80's. 100% needed that to get around Orange County. Had to get a new one every year because of the massive growth in the area at the time.
Ahh, the memories. Not from LA, but we would holiday in the south of Europe. My dad would drive, my mum would navigate, with a thick European road guide, ring-bound and printed on plasticised A4. As anyone who's gone through that knows: your parents would get into intense arguments. My favourite was the phrase 'Ah, we should have taken that exit'. Having learnt to drive in the era of satnavs, I only recently discovered the joy of driving without one. Where I live, roads and highways are laid out very logically, and traffic signs are clear. You only really have to look up where to go for the final mile(s) of your journey, which I do before I leave. I've found that it has improved my sense of direction and my enjoyment of driving immensely :). Now I want a paper map guide!
Oh man, I forgot to include the fact that paper maps are outdated the moment they're printed. Road closures, changes, etc. mandated that you had to buy new maps every so often, and still, you'd find yourself stuck because a road was now one-way or its course had been modified.
My grandfather was a sales rep in the 80s and 90s, I remember his car always having a dog eared Thomas Guide and tons of sample product in it. I would also randomly pick it from the back seat and loved finding where we were on the map as he drove
I lived near a paper street on the local Thomas guide that connected some major streets through several neighborhoods, about once a month a truck driver from out of town would take that street and discover the dead end which ended around a corner. Sometimes the truck driver was driving a triple trailer (Oregon) requiring multiple disconnections and tow trucks to get them back on the major highway
Thanks for the memories!! :) Spent HOURS just flipping through them, studying them. 'Surfing'.
And all the fascinating info to be found on the pages.......
And the amazement as a boy for using the guide as we drove and making predictions for what lay ahead and then THERE IT WAS.
I have very fond memories of being navigator for my dad on family trips in his 78 Pontiac Lemans in Washington State in the 80s and 90's. I have instant nostalgia with Thomas guides. My other favorite was the big atlas that was maybe 3 times the size but you could see more at once. I'd go back and forth to get perspective. Thomas for granular detail and atlas to contextualize the whole trip. Good times.
I am a scoutmaster in the Netherlands and have loved maps for decades. I used to write programs during my drafting period in the army to remove details from maps when going from 1:10.000 to 1:25.000. And I worked for a company that sold navigation devices and digital maps. Still love paper maps and we use them in Scouting very often (next to GPS). So I totally understand your point.
Thanks for the memories. I moved to California in 2002 to be with my then boyfriend, who had come out for a job a couple months ahead of me. When I arrived, presented me with my very own Thomas Guides for Sacramento County AND Bay Area Metro. I used them all the time.
I was trying to navigate to a location in the South Bay with a print out from Mapquest that appeared to be wrong, some years later. I pulled out the Thomas Guide - and realized I couldn't read the print by the light of my dome light any longer, which was my clue it was time to see an eye doctor and get some glasses.
They were still under the seat of my 1999 Toyota Tacoma when I donated it in 2018 to someone who had lost their vehicle in the Paradise fire. (So was my folding map of Bergen County, NJ.)
For many years, a few decades actually, I used Thomas Guides in exactly the way you describe. Had a few, a well worn LA guide, and a few other CA guides for areas I frequently visited. Knew how to use them, and they were essential. About 8 years ago, enamored with the convenience of GPS on my phone, I dumped them (Goodwill or something). A regretful decision. I keep thinking now I should buy a new one. GPS is great, but when it isn’t, Thomas guide to the rescue. I’m gonna get a new one. Loved this episode.
Maps can also be a fun and beautiful way to study history.
I've never used the Thomas Guide, but have loving memories of two other maps:
In Germany years ago, with no money at all but heaps of curiosity, my partner and I used an old Zurich Insurance atlas on every free day. The atlas hit the perfect balance between information and mystery: there were icons for various sites of interest, but no way to know anything beyond it being a schloss or a burg or whatever. We would randomly choose a new icon and chase it down, finding half a castle turned into a small town's post office, or a heap of stones that may once have been a fort all the way up to a fully conserved palace. Amazing way to explore the country.
The other one is an absolute classic - the Milepost. We drove from Texas to Anchorage Alaska, and the Milepost was invaluable. It takes you mile by mile along the Alcan, warning where there were frost heaves, how far between places to get fuel or find a place to stay, where there was only gravel that might destroy your windscreen. It has to be republished every year as conditions on the thousands of miles of road can change enormously, so the hard copy we had is a relic of a landscape that is vastly different now. Brilliant.
My dad taught me how to use and navigate that map. So many pages were paperclipped for frequent reference.
Looking up and charting our course and bookmarking our path was the start of the vacation ritual. A trip to AAA for maps, location guides, traveler checks, and hotel booking.
I work as a stagehand. When I first started doing so I was given a list of required tools. Among them wrenches , hammers and so on. The Thomas Guide was among the required tools as we would work at various venues around LA. It was a lifesaver more than once I tell you.
Growing up in L.A., I began collecting gas station maps at age 7 in 1966.
By the time I turned 9, my folks gave me a new Thomas Guide to Los Angeles County for my birthday or maybe Christmas.
I was in heaven!
Years ago I bought a 1955 Thomas Guide at a yard sale.
I could navigate around the whole county as a kid.