# Remember Thomas Guides?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Created:** [February 5, 2015, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906 "2015-02-05T17:48:13Z")
**Posts on this page:** 12
**Page:** 3
### Author:  [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)
#### Post date: [February 8, 2015, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906/41 "2015-02-08T14:47:16Z")
I moved there in '87. Shots used to wake me up not all that unfrequently. I said to myself that the next time I heard a gunshot in the alley, I was going to yell out the window ‘Do you _mind?_ People are trying to _sleep!_’ And right after I said that to myself, the Crips and the Bloods came to their truce and it quieted down significantly.
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### Author:  [@typoink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/typoink)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2015, 12:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906/42 "2015-02-10T00:07:06Z")
Was there a Chicago equivalent? If so, I never saw one. I started driving after the Internet era, though, so MapQuest etc were around (ubiquitous GPS was still a decade or so away, though). I don’t remember my parents having anything similar, though – just a basic Northern Illinois road map and looking up addresses online or in a phone book. Calling a business for directions was pretty common.
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### Author:  [@Mr\_Downtown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr_Downtown)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2015, 5:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906/43 "2015-02-10T05:41:37Z")
Two companies published the Chicago equivalents: the Consolidated Sales Corp. (later part of American Map) _Chicagoland Atlas_ and the _Rand McNally & Co. Six-County_ (now _Seven County) Street Guide._ However, they differed from Thomas Guides in a very important way: they were based on preexisting subregional sheet maps (Chicago itself, North Shore, Elgin Area, Northern DuPage, Joliet Area, etc.) rather than dividing the entire region into a logical page-number sequence that never changed. So using one of the Chicagoland Atlas books required first knowing or looking up the subregional “chapter” in which your area of interest would be found.
In the 1990s, Rand McNally completely rebuilt its urban atlases using a digital workflow, so the more recent _Six/Seven-County Street Guides_ **do** work the same way as Thomas Guides, even having unused page numbers for future expansion.
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### Author:  [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2015, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906/44 "2015-02-10T16:14:57Z")
> [@bump](#):
>
> I’m pretty sure every major metro area had something similar. Houston had Key Maps and Dallas had Mapsco maps (just called a “Mapsco”). Both of them were the page/letter square style where you could look up an address in the index, and it would tell you page and alphabetic grid square.
>
> Were the Thomas Guides like that?
Yes, but as a person who had a job that used paper maps from all over the country, the Thomas Guides were the Rolls-Royce’s of paper maps while the others were, at best, Mercury’s.
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### Author:  [@typoink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/typoink)
#### Post date: [February 11, 2015, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906/45 "2015-02-11T03:03:43Z")
> [@Mr\_Downtown](#):
>
> Two companies published the Chicago equivalents: the Consolidated Sales Corp. (later part of American Map) _Chicagoland Atlas_ and the _Rand McNally & Co. Six-County_ (now _Seven County) Street Guide._ However, they differed from Thomas Guides in a very important way: they were based on preexisting subregional sheet maps (Chicago itself, North Shore, Elgin Area, Northern DuPage, Joliet Area, etc.) rather than dividing the entire region into a logical page-number sequence that never changed. So using one of the Chicagoland Atlas books required first knowing or looking up the subregional “chapter” in which your area of interest would be found.
>
> In the 1990s, Rand McNally completely rebuilt its urban atlases using a digital workflow, so the more recent _Six/Seven-County Street Guides_ **do** work the same way as Thomas Guides, even having unused page numbers for future expansion.
Were these ever hugely popular? I don’t ever remember anybody having one, whereas I hear Thomas Guides were completely ubiquitous in some areas. That said, I grew up in the far 'burbs, so maybe I just wasn’t in cars with the right folk.
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### Author:  [@Mr\_Downtown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr_Downtown)
#### Post date: [February 11, 2015, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906/46 "2015-02-11T04:51:48Z")
I think the Chicago-area atlases were roughly as widespread as Thomas Guides in Southern California: not in every car, but well-known to anyone who frequently drove in unfamiliar parts of the metro area. Besides the usual bookstore outlets, they were sold in Sam’s Clubs and Office Depot.
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### Author:  [@Harvey\_The\_Heavy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Harvey_The_Heavy)
#### Post date: [February 11, 2015, 8:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906/47 "2015-02-11T08:28:31Z")
Those things were like my bible back in the day. I still remember what color most of the suburbs were. Burbank=pink, Glendale=tan, Pasadena=pink again, South Pasadena=green etc. I used to wear out an LA book in about a year, so I’d rip those pages out and save the Orange county pages and get a new LA/Ventura book, then salvage the Ventura section after a year.
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### Author:  [@dougie\_monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dougie_monty)
#### Post date: [February 11, 2015, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906/48 "2015-02-11T17:22:59Z")
I found the Thomas Brothers Maps superior to the Rand McNally filling - station maps because they had current information on streets. The gas station map showed a “Greenleaf Drive” running through Alondra Park in Lawndale; there’s no such thing. And the maps showed a “Joseph Street” running near the old Santa Fe tracks in Manhattan Beach; no such street has existed there since 1916, according to the postmaster at the time–born and raised in the city.
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### Author:  [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)
#### Post date: [February 11, 2015, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906/49 "2015-02-11T18:01:39Z")
Those may be “copyright traps”, purposeful errors in the maps used to identify copyright thieves. Or they could be sloppy map-making.
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### Author:  [@Mr\_Downtown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr_Downtown)
#### Post date: [February 12, 2015, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906/50 "2015-02-12T05:04:08Z")
Nearly all “nonexistent” streets found on maps are what we mapmakers call _paper streets._ They’ve been dedicated on the plat of the subdivision, but were never improved with curbs and gutters and smooth paving surfaces. Whether to show them on maps is always a question for the mapmaker. One going up the side of a heavily wooded Oregon hillside? Probably not. One that looks to be well rutted—in a place where 4WD trucks are common—used as the back way into a New Mexico trailer park? Probably so.
Aerial photos were fairly hard to come by until a decade ago, so most mapmakers relied solely on tracing the streets recorded in the county plat books. That meant hundreds of streets in some Southwestern cities whose existence was a matter of interpretation.
Copyright traps were never anywhere near as common as laymen think, and after the 1991 _Feist_ decision they were of no use in copyright lawsuits. Most errors were simply mistakes or the aforementioned paper streets.
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### Author:  [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)
#### Post date: [February 12, 2015, 7:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906/51 "2015-02-12T07:21:52Z")
> [@JohnT](#):
>
> Those may be “copyright traps”, purposeful errors in the maps used to identify copyright thieves. Or they could be sloppy map-making.
> [@Mr\_Downtown](#):
>
> Copyright traps were never anywhere near as common as laymen think, and after the 1991 _Feist_ decision they were of no use in copyright lawsuits. Most errors were simply mistakes or the aforementioned paper streets.
Including the kind of thing I mentioned above?
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### Author:  [@Mr\_Downtown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr_Downtown)
#### Post date: [February 13, 2015, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-thomas-guides/711906/52 "2015-02-13T05:16:03Z")
Thomas Guides did say, in the pre-_Feist_ days, that they included a few short “trap” streets. They were always dead-ends that wouldn’t cause problems for anyone.
I don’t think the San Vicente median detail would have been a copyright trap. That’s just the sort of thing that gets changed by the Public Works Dept. and the mapmaker has no way of knowing about it. It’s a little easier to check such things now that we can just look at aerial photos online.
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