The Map Room

The Albany Times-Union has a story about local map publisher Jimapco. They’ve recently moved into online maps, launching their Map Room website (no relation). “Map Room features colorful, interactive maps of Capital Region features from tax rates to golfing and goes beyond the Round Lake map-making company’s old strategy of creating static, customized maps for online use.”

Peter Watts (the British journalist, not the Canadian science fiction writer) pours cold water on the urban myth that Phyllis Pearsall walked 3,000 miles of London streets — repeated by yours truly as well as many others — to create the famous A to Z map of the city. He quotes Peter Barber, head of the British Library’s map department, who calls the story “complete rubbish”: Pearsall’s father had produced map books of London, which, Barber believes, Pearsall simply updated. The story was an exercise in marketing and myth-making — an effective one, if we’re still repeating it decades later. Via @HodderGeography.

Previously: A to Z Map of London, 1936; Phyllis Pearsall.

Here’s another profile of MapArt’s founders Hart and Rita Schwerdt, this time from Inside Toronto. The retrospectives seem to be coming because, at 70, they’re handing over the reins to their son.

Previously: Mapmobility/MapArt Founders Profiled.

The Toronto Star profiles Hartmut and Rita Schwerdt, who founded the company now known as Mapmobility back in 1978. Mapmobility is apparently the new name of [update: it’s apparently more complicated than that] MapArt, whose road maps of Canadian cities and regions are well-known (and, incidentally, fantastic); I reviewed their mammoth Canada Back Road Atlas two years ago. The company is now making a push online, as you might have expected.

Totem Publications, a Pacific Northwest publisher of detailed maps of obscure parts of Washington state, appears to be winding down, the Everett Herald reports. For certain parts of the state, the maps are “the only map game in town,” offering detail not available in competitors’ products.

A Publishers Weekly article on the impact of online references like Wikipedia on reference publishing — multi-volume encyclopedias are essentially toast — has the following passage about maps and atlases: Encyclopedias aren’t the only place publishers are feeling pain, though….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Two map publishers — Compass Maps and GeoCenter publishing group — are in court over an origami-based method of folding maps, The Times reports in a brief article. “Compass Maps say they created the ‘star-fold’ map and developed the brand…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another profile of map publisher (and now GPS maker) DeLorme, this time from the Bangor Daily News’s Bill Graves. DeLorme got its start mapping Maine, so no surprise that the Maine media likes to cover the company’s history: local success…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Independent profiles the two guys behind Cassini Maps, a company founded in 2005 that publishes enhanced reproductions of old maps….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A look at map publisher DeLorme, particularly its origins in the 1970s when it got its start making maps of Maine’s private lands (maps of which were woefully out of date at that point), in yesterday’s Central Maine Morning Sentinel….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Northwest Herald, a suburban Chicago paper, has a profile of local cartographer Tom Wilcockson, whose one-man company, Mapcraft, specializes in custom cartography work. Each project takes him between two weeks and a month to complete, so this is cartography…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Still catching up on some older stories. Two weeks ago, the Florida Times-Union profiled a local home-based business, Outfitter’s Mapping, that produces aerial photographic maps of Florida fishing areas. Via All Points Blog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Associated Press’s Dave Carpenter takes a look at map publisher Rand McNally on the occasion of its 150th anniversary, looking back on its history and at its future challenges (especially in re digital mapping). “[F]ollowing two ownership changes…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The 100th anniversary of Phyllis Pearsall’s birth was celebrated in the UK on Monday. She founded the A-Z Map Company in 1936 to publish a (now-legendary) map of London — which she compiled by walking 3,000 miles’ worth of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

On Friday the 7th, there was an item on mapping on Patt Morrison’s afternoon show on 89.3 KPCC, a public radio station based in Pasadena, California. On deck were representatives from Thomas Brothers Maps and Navteq; much of the focus…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Japanese map publishers are responding to the challenge of car navigation systems by shifting their focus to so-called “value-added maps,” the Asahi Shimbun reports in a profile of Maruzen, a Tokyo bookstore with a large map section. According to [Jinbun-sha…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A Calgary mapmaker has been fined C$8,000 for making a cheap knock-off of a competitor’s city atlas. The judge ruled that Commodore Allen’s AMI Calgary Street Atlas infringed the copyright of Sherlock Publishing’s atlas of Calgary, saying that the differences…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Samuel John Klein’s Brief History of Rand McNally is up on Designorati today. Interesting to see that William Rand and Andrew McNally started with railroads (road travel was some decades away); their first map, in 1872, was the Railway Guide….  •  Continue reading this entry.