Атласы дорог Томаса: История и современность

American series of street atlases

Thomas Guide is a series of paperback, spiral bound atlases featuring detailed street maps of various large metropolitan areas in the United States, including Boise, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Oakland, Phoenix, Portland, Reno Tahoe, Sacramento, San Francisco, Seattle, Tucson, and Baltimore Washington metropolitan area. Road Atlas titles are Arizona including Las Vegas, California Including portions of Nevada, and Pacific Northwest covering Washington, Oregon, Western Idaho, Southwestern British Columbia. The map books are usually arranged by county; for example, separate Thomas Guides have been published for Los Angeles County and San Diego County. There are also guides that will have two or three counties combined (for example, Los Angeles and Orange County), or guides that cover a metropolitan area (for instance, the San Francisco Bay Area). Each guide has a detailed index of streets and points of interest, as well as arterial maps for easy page location. Thomas Guides were a local icon in Southern California for decades, with many companies including the Thomas Guide map grid information for their locations in Yellow Pages listings and other advertisements.

Thomas Bros. Maps, the publishers of the Thomas Guide, previously known as Popular Street Atlas, Street Guide, and Popular Atlas, was started in Oakland, California, in 1915 by cartographer George Coupland Thomas and his two brothers, who were business partners. Early publications were detailed block maps, bird eye view of communities, road & highway maps, and what would be generally referred as generalized tourist maps. Thomas Bros. also produced redlining maps of Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and the East Bay for the US government sponsored Home Owners' Loan Corporation in the 1930s. The company relocated its headquarters to Los Angeles in 1940. The company had grown to publish street maps of cities in several Western states; these maps were sold in fold out, card stock covers. By the late 1940s, the company had added pocket sized guidebooks of California and the city of San Francisco which included fold out maps attached to the inner rear cover. The first street guides, which were initially pocket sized paperback booklets also began to appear at about this time, and were introduced for several counties in California, and one in Washington. An updated Thomas Guide for Los Angeles and Orange Counties was published in 2021, three years after its previous update. Larry Thomas, majority owner of the Thomas Maps brand, noted that California state legislation requires police and fire vehicles to carry Thomas Guides, and that the brand sold 1,000 to 1,500 guides per year.