Geographer's A–Z Street Atlas

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The cover of the 2004 Edition of the London A to Z

The A–Z, or in full, the Geographers' A–Z Street Atlas is a name given to any one of a range of atlases of streets in the United Kingdom currently produced by Geographers' A-Z Map Company Limited. The first atlas, of London, was originally compiled in the 1930s by Phyllis Pearsall. The company she founded now publishes street maps of many cities and towns in the UK.

Contents

[edit] Dating old maps

The cover of the Authentic Map of London from 1957

Until quite recently, the maps produced by the Geographers' (A-Z) Map Company did not list their publication date, so dating them can be quite hard. A few things that can help are:

  • Their first map was published in 1936
  • There were no maps produced by them during WW2 (1939-1945)
  • Until 1962, the "Published By" address was 24 Grays Inn Road, Holborn, London
  • From 1962 to 1992, the "Published By" address was Sevenoaks, Kent
  • From 1992 onwards, the "Published By" address is Borough Green, Kent
  • In 1972, the company name was changed from Geographers' Map Company to Geographers' A-Z Map Company

[edit] Cartographic date

The key of Geographers' map, with the date code shown

On all their maps, there is a 3 or 4 letter code in one of the corners, often the one containing the key. These letters represent numbers, which are the cartographic date, in the form (M)MYY. There is at least one scheme in use, but possibly also a second.

One scheme is JIHGFEDCBA, for the numbers 1 through 9 and 0, so that HFD would be 357, or March 1957. This seems to be used on all of their maps not in book form (it may be used in the book form ones, but that has not been confirmed).

[edit] Media appearance

The Geographer's A–Z Street Atlas and the story of how Phyllis Pearsall came to write the first edition covering London was featured in a 2005 episode of Nicholas Crane's Map Man TV programme. This programme revealed the interesting information that on all their maps A-Z print a non-existent trap street so that they can tell if a map has been illegally copied from theirs, a technique used by several publishers of reference works (see fictitious entry).

[edit] External links

[edit] Sources

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