Category — Road Maps

The California State Automobile Association produced its first road map in 1909, and will produce its last this year, nearly 100 years later, a victim to the shift to digital technology.

The auto club, which serves Northern California, Nevada and Utah, is phasing out its 12-person cartographic unit by year-end, a spokesperson said.

The AAA map has become something of a traveler’s icon over the decades, a no-cost product appreciated for both its utility and its beauty. In the tightly-knit mapmaking world, CSAA’s products are a yardstick by which other roadmaps are measured.

Fast booting paper maps will still be available for free to club members, but will be produced by AAA’s headquarters in Florida.

Read the full story here.

[tags]AAA maps, california automobile association maps, road maps[/tags]

I see where Ephemera has an interview with road map collector and former president of the the Road Map Collectors Association, Richard Horwitz. It is always interesting to see how collectors of items not neccessarily of the mainstream get their start:

Horwitz: I was nine-years-old in 1951 when my father, a dentist in Chicago, asked me to pick up a bunch of maps he requested from the Sinclair Travel Bureau for our family drive to Florida. I remember being fascinated by the maps, and I loved following them as we drove the routes. I still have one of them–the map of Miami.

The full interview is available from Ephemera. 

[tags]road maps, collecting road maps, road map collectors association[/tags]

…there were other methods of collecting the information needed to make road maps. Caught Mapping (1940) is a brief but interesting movie that shows the “modern, stream-lined methods” for making up-to-date road maps in the United States in a bygone era.

Via Cartography.

[tags]Cartography, Map Making, Antique Maps, Map Collecting[/tags]