The teen queens of the movie “Clueless” may have had everything, but they still didn’t have one of the GPS navigators so common in cars today. Back in 1995, when Cher and Dion had to trek from Beverly Hills to a party in Sun Valley — 16 or so miles from the L.A. Basin into the San Fernando Valley, via Laurel Canyon or Coldwater Canyon or the Hollywood Freeway — a satellite-based navigation system would’ve run them well over $1,000, likely putting it outside even their fine-boned grasps. Instead, the girls found their way using the $20-or-so Thomas Guide.
For decades, all of Southern ’s commuting legions, from privileged teens to weathered truckers, relied on the Thomas Guide — a thick, spiral-bound atlas with every neighborhood, landmark and freeway on-ramp indexed and marked on its pages, gridded by number and letter.
George Coupland Thomas, a cartographer, founded Thomas Bros. Maps in Oakland in 1915 with his brothers Gilbert and Leonard, who both left the company soon after to pursue other careers. Thomas nurtured his company and devoted to it his gift of extreme precision. He sent workers down every new or altered road to make each map, rather than relying on tips. He claimed to be accurate to within 10 feet.
George didn’t have the best head for business — his lone attempt at a slogan was the elliptical, nonrhythmic, “If it’s a map, try us” — but he made some smart decisions. He transformed the shape and size of his maps, moving from fold-ups that quickly lost their crispness to a bound book. And at the end of World War II, he moved the company to Los Angeles, where Thomas Bros. would ride the seemingly unending boom in residents and roads.
Populations rose dramatically from 1945 to 1960 in every Southern California region: the San Fernando Valley doubled, Orange County tripled, and the Inland Empire seeded its future boom. By 1960, Los Angeles had arterial roadways linking vast stretches, like the curvy country-roadish Arroyo Seco Parkway and the already-clogged Hollywood Freeway; the soon-to-be-clogged Santa Monica Freeway was under construction. These — marked as thick, dark lines in the Thomas Guide — coursed through a maze of roads known as “surface streets,” in contrast to the unpassably traffic-choked highways.
And the Thomas Guide specialized in surface streets. Anyone could mentally map the system of freeways. Major streets were easy enough to learn, those six-lane routes from sea to city center or valley, named after powerful men (Mulholland, Wilshire, Pico, Washington); dreamy places (Olympic, Venice); or natural phenomena (La Cienega and La Brea, respectively, the swamp and the tar). But going to new places, or finding an alternate route from West Adams to Brentwood at rush hour, required a Thomas Guide.
George himself didn’t live to see through the big boom. In 1955, a few years after his death, the company’s onetime attorney, Warren Wilson, bought Thomas Bros. Maps for $1 million. Under Wilson’s watch, the Thomas Guide moved into new digs in downtown Los Angeles, at Pico and Broadway, in a building listed, of course, as the number one “point of interest” in every Thomas map. (The company claimed it was so customers could come by when a new edition came out each year.) The company expanded the territory it mapped; eventually it would chart much of the western United States. Though sales figures were never made public, Wilson did tell the Los Angeles Times that tens of millions of guides were sold in the company’s first seven decades, making it one of the most successful minority-owned firms in the city. (Wilson identified himself as a Creole.) The company launched a geography education foundation in the 1980s, an Olympic edition in 1984, special maps for travelers and — despite fearing it would be a financially losing proposition — a Spanish-language edition in the 1990s, for the sake of California’s newest arrivals. The maps assured everyone who might have thought otherwise that Southern California was permanent and knowable, even to its many newcomers.
The maps — drafted with rulers, ink and erasers on Mylar — relied, in addition to the work of its staff, on tips from city governments, chambers of commerce, cabbies, chauffeurs, deliverymen, politicians, civic engineers, firemen and cops. Advertising was unnecessary — everyone knew the Thomas Guide by name alone.
But increasing authority had its downside. Dozens of customer calls reported each Thomas Guide error, and buyers constantly demanded a large-print edition, which would have made the guide thicker than a phone book. L.A. officials were irked when they denied the petition of one Rudy Vallee to change his street name to Rue de Vallee — but noticed that the Thomas Guide made the change. A woman’s address was accidentally listed as a point of interest — because a cartographer answering her father’s call for directions wrote down the address and accidentally filed it with local landmarks. Dozens of drivers drove up to take photos and knock on her door. A truck driver, believing he saw a through-street in his Thomas Guide where there was only a cul-de-sac, rammed through a home. The error was the driver’s, but Thomas Bros. altered the scale of its next edition to avoid another mistake.
By the time “Clueless” teens came to use the Thomas Guide, the company had moved into larger offices in Irvine. After 75 years of working with relatively unchanging technology, the Guide converted to digital mapping, one of the first companies to do so. It required a complete reordering of its numbered and lettered grids, creating chaos for all the dispatchers — of ambulances, fire trucks, shuttle vans, taxis and pizzas — that used them.
When the company started issuing CD-ROMs and exploring in-car navigation systems — competing against the General Motors-funded and briefly Rupert Murdoch-controlled Etak — sales of its paper guidebooks fell significantly. In 1999, the company was acquired by the biggest brand in maps, Rand McNally. Soon, most cars — or at least the cellphones of their drivers — had GPS-based navigation systems. Rather than reading a map, drivers could follow a pulsing dot down well-known roads, and suffer the impatiently intoned “Rerouting” if they dared try a shortcut or scenic tangent. And though some Thomas Guides still litter passenger-side leg-room and some are still being printed, the brand is no longer the singular authority of the road, the guide no longer there to give the big picture.
Swati Pandey is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.
For decades, all of Southern ’s commuting legions, from privileged teens to weathered truckers, relied on the Thomas Guide — a thick, spiral-bound atlas with every neighborhood, landmark and freeway on-ramp indexed and marked on its pages, gridded by number and letter.
George Coupland Thomas, a cartographer, founded Thomas Bros. Maps in Oakland in 1915 with his brothers Gilbert and Leonard, who both left the company soon after to pursue other careers. Thomas nurtured his company and devoted to it his gift of extreme precision. He sent workers down every new or altered road to make each map, rather than relying on tips. He claimed to be accurate to within 10 feet.
George didn’t have the best head for business — his lone attempt at a slogan was the elliptical, nonrhythmic, “If it’s a map, try us” — but he made some smart decisions. He transformed the shape and size of his maps, moving from fold-ups that quickly lost their crispness to a bound book. And at the end of World War II, he moved the company to Los Angeles, where Thomas Bros. would ride the seemingly unending boom in residents and roads.
Populations rose dramatically from 1945 to 1960 in every Southern California region: the San Fernando Valley doubled, Orange County tripled, and the Inland Empire seeded its future boom. By 1960, Los Angeles had arterial roadways linking vast stretches, like the curvy country-roadish Arroyo Seco Parkway and the already-clogged Hollywood Freeway; the soon-to-be-clogged Santa Monica Freeway was under construction. These — marked as thick, dark lines in the Thomas Guide — coursed through a maze of roads known as “surface streets,” in contrast to the unpassably traffic-choked highways.
And the Thomas Guide specialized in surface streets. Anyone could mentally map the system of freeways. Major streets were easy enough to learn, those six-lane routes from sea to city center or valley, named after powerful men (Mulholland, Wilshire, Pico, Washington); dreamy places (Olympic, Venice); or natural phenomena (La Cienega and La Brea, respectively, the swamp and the tar). But going to new places, or finding an alternate route from West Adams to Brentwood at rush hour, required a Thomas Guide.
George himself didn’t live to see through the big boom. In 1955, a few years after his death, the company’s onetime attorney, Warren Wilson, bought Thomas Bros. Maps for $1 million. Under Wilson’s watch, the Thomas Guide moved into new digs in downtown Los Angeles, at Pico and Broadway, in a building listed, of course, as the number one “point of interest” in every Thomas map. (The company claimed it was so customers could come by when a new edition came out each year.) The company expanded the territory it mapped; eventually it would chart much of the western United States. Though sales figures were never made public, Wilson did tell the Los Angeles Times that tens of millions of guides were sold in the company’s first seven decades, making it one of the most successful minority-owned firms in the city. (Wilson identified himself as a Creole.) The company launched a geography education foundation in the 1980s, an Olympic edition in 1984, special maps for travelers and — despite fearing it would be a financially losing proposition — a Spanish-language edition in the 1990s, for the sake of California’s newest arrivals. The maps assured everyone who might have thought otherwise that Southern California was permanent and knowable, even to its many newcomers.
The maps — drafted with rulers, ink and erasers on Mylar — relied, in addition to the work of its staff, on tips from city governments, chambers of commerce, cabbies, chauffeurs, deliverymen, politicians, civic engineers, firemen and cops. Advertising was unnecessary — everyone knew the Thomas Guide by name alone.
But increasing authority had its downside. Dozens of customer calls reported each Thomas Guide error, and buyers constantly demanded a large-print edition, which would have made the guide thicker than a phone book. L.A. officials were irked when they denied the petition of one Rudy Vallee to change his street name to Rue de Vallee — but noticed that the Thomas Guide made the change. A woman’s address was accidentally listed as a point of interest — because a cartographer answering her father’s call for directions wrote down the address and accidentally filed it with local landmarks. Dozens of drivers drove up to take photos and knock on her door. A truck driver, believing he saw a through-street in his Thomas Guide where there was only a cul-de-sac, rammed through a home. The error was the driver’s, but Thomas Bros. altered the scale of its next edition to avoid another mistake.
By the time “Clueless” teens came to use the Thomas Guide, the company had moved into larger offices in Irvine. After 75 years of working with relatively unchanging technology, the Guide converted to digital mapping, one of the first companies to do so. It required a complete reordering of its numbered and lettered grids, creating chaos for all the dispatchers — of ambulances, fire trucks, shuttle vans, taxis and pizzas — that used them.
When the company started issuing CD-ROMs and exploring in-car navigation systems — competing against the General Motors-funded and briefly Rupert Murdoch-controlled Etak — sales of its paper guidebooks fell significantly. In 1999, the company was acquired by the biggest brand in maps, Rand McNally. Soon, most cars — or at least the cellphones of their drivers — had GPS-based navigation systems. Rather than reading a map, drivers could follow a pulsing dot down well-known roads, and suffer the impatiently intoned “Rerouting” if they dared try a shortcut or scenic tangent. And though some Thomas Guides still litter passenger-side leg-room and some are still being printed, the brand is no longer the singular authority of the road, the guide no longer there to give the big picture.
Swati Pandey is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.
The Thomas Guide went from fold-up maps that quickly lost their crispness to a handy, bound book.
