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.
History
1915: Creation in Oakland, CA 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.
Acquisition by Warren B. Wilson; digital age After George Coupland Thomas died in 1955, the company was acquired by Coupland Thomas's family lawyer Warren B. Wilson. Wilson's brother Lionel would later become mayor of Oakland. During the California home development boom of the late 1970s, Wilson moved the company to a newly built state-of-the-art design building in an industrial park in Irvine, California, in early 1980. For 40 years, Wilson served as CEO and owner of Thomas Bros. Maps (TBM) and was responsible for leading the company into the digital age. Starting in the 1990s, Wilson hired many CEOs to run the company to give him more time for traveling and studying his love of art. After conversion and completion of all of their pen and ink map atlases to digital format in the mid-1990s, map data became a significant part of TBM company sales. The company had large data contracts in the 1990s with the California Highway Patrol, large utilities, and many area cities and counties. The Thomas Brothers map database had a monopoly in the 1990s, since they had the best street address indexes in them, making them very good for address matching for businesses.
Acquisition by Rand McNally; decline Because sales of its last produced guidebooks for Washington, D.C., and Virginia did not sell as expected and much money was lost on the website store design, the company was in major debt. The company also intended to conquer the East Coast, but failed to compete against existing mapmakers there. It was purchased by and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Rand McNally in 1999. The company made radical changes in operation beginning in November 2003, and let go many of Thomas Brothers' most skilled cartographers and employees. The Rand McNally CEO announced all Irvine data edits would be outsourced to Bangalore, India. The remaining Irvine employees would send and manage the data to and from India and check the map work Indian editors did before publishing. After January 2004, many important things in the guides were cut to save money. The valued POI index was no longer updated. Thinner and cheaper paper was used in the map guides. The Irvine source department was closed and no customer corrections were taken or recorded. Many guides were no longer printed yearly. The book name was dropped to just Thomas Guide and colors changed to match Rand McNally colors and product line releases. The popular map store was closed at the Irvine building, which was the last TBM store to close as they had they shut the ones in San Francisco, downtown Los Angeles, and the South Coast Plaza Mall years earlier. The map guides still sell, but the famous digital map database is now outdated. Rand McNally now buys their map data and updates from the big map digital data companies like Tele Atlas and Navteq. They overlay the new streets on their old database for publication. Rand McNally/TBM no longer has any employees or customer service in California, after laying off the final Irvine headquarters employees in 2009. An updated Thomas Guide for Los Angeles and Orange Counties was published in 2021, three years after its previous update; it was updated again in 2025. The only other Thomas Guide regularly updated is for San Diego County (2022 edition, being updated in June 2026). Larry Thomas, majority owner of the Thomas Maps brand, noted that California state legislation required police and fire vehicles to carry Thomas Guides, though as of 2025 that was no longer the case, and that the brand sold 1,000 to 1,500 guides per year.
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