Mapmakers Grid and Bear Southland’s Nuances

Map geeks aren’t made. They’re born. They come into this world with a special sense of spatiality, a heightened awareness of their place in the world and a need to help others find theirs.

A preacher guides lost souls. A map geek points to Page 830, Grid E-4, and says, “There you are.”

At least that’s what they do at the corporate headquarters of Thomas Bros. Maps.

“I have globes all over my house,” said Nancy Yoho, 44, a self-described map geek and Thomas Bros. vice president who oversees production of arguably the most indispensable book in Southern California. “It’s just something that starts when you’re a kid.”

Thomas Bros. is in a nondescript Irvine industrial park under the flight path for John Wayne Airport. Here, the company’s catalog of printed and digital map titles is produced, including its best-seller, the 1,000-plus-page tome covering Los Angeles and Orange counties that weighs as much as a pot roast.

If you are not aware of it, you are: a) a visitor to Southern California; or b) hopelessly lost.

The company was founded in 1915 by Oakland cartographer George Coupland Thomas and his two brothers, who came up with the guide’s distinctive page-and-grid system as an alternative to folding maps.

In the 1940s, Thomas had an epiphany and moved the company to Southern California, which in the postwar boom was quickly becoming the epitome of America’s car culture. With the Southland’s constant expansion and a road network that features a bewildering lack of consistent numbering, the Thomas brothers had tapped into a ready-made market that grew with each year’s update.

The company moved from Los Angeles to a larger facility in Irvine in 1980. Since then, Thomas Bros. has undergone a transformation, including digitization of its mapmaking and expansion of its product line beyond the West Coast. In 1999, the company was purchased by mapmaking conglomerate Rand McNally.

Cartography is an ancient art, and perhaps its most famous early practitioner, the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, produced an eight-volume work on geography that gave order to the known world by locating some 8,000 places.

The work that’s done at Thomas Bros. in Irvine is far more prosaic. About 70 people work in cubicles amid insurance-office quiet, updating information and redrawing maps by computer.

The traditional tools of the 20th century mapmaker -- ruler, ink, eraser, utility blade, huge sheets of Mylar -- gave way to computers beginning in the late 1980s. Today, when Robert Heyl needs to add a new street to the Orange County guide, all that’s needed are a few clicks of a mouse and -- voila! -- Sidney Bay Drive in Newport Coast has become a bit more real.

“I’ve always had a fascination with maps,” said Heyl, whose absorption with location and direction also began as a child. “It’s fun, relaxing work. I can think of no better way to spend a day.”

By keeping in contact with hundreds of public and private entities and using aerial photography, mapmakers record Southern California’s changing landscape. The annual update of the Los Angeles County-Orange County street guide requires thousands of additions and alterations: freshly carved streets, new schools and fire stations, shifting city boundaries, dozens of name changes.

There’s so much change, in fact, that keeping up with it all is near impossible. Last year, for instance, soon after the 2004 edition went to press, Edison International Field was renamed Angel Stadium of Anaheim. Thomas Bros. will catch up with that in 2005. “Every map is out of date by the time it’s printed,” Yoho said.

And people notice.

Thomas Guide users are an attentive bunch and not shy about pointing out errors, including misspellings or botched locations. Suggestions on how to improve the book roll in all the time.

Change the colors. Laminate the pages. A customer recently suggested that each and every street-side mailbox get its own dot.

A perennial complaint is to make the maps and type bigger so they’re easier to read.

“People have written in and asked: ‘Can you make the book shorter so that fits on my steering wheel better?’ ” Yoho said.

To this, she has a suggestion of her own: “You probably shouldn’t be driving with the Thomas Guide on your steering wheel.”