This is surely the only worthwhile book devoted to the free oil company road map. The one hundred and thirty-two pages have more than two hundred map covers and related art. Chapter one has some fascinating illustrations of early versions of how to show a road and what words to include to help the motorist. The first proper map came out in 1895, before that some railroad route maps were overprinted with roads.
It was probably advances in printing in the first two decades of the last century that created a useful road map, now maps could have fine detail that could cover a complete state. Rand McNally printed road maps for Gulf Oil in 1920, given away free at their gas stations. McNally was the biggest of the three main road map printers, next came Gousha and General Drafting.
National oil companies and smaller regional companies saw the free map for motorists as a surefire way to sell more gas. Multi-state and single-state, tourist trails and city maps must have been printed in the millions over the decades. Esso and Tydol produced maps of airline routes and Mobil, Esso and Gulf distributed nautical cruising guides for the waterways of the nation. As the big oil companies were international, page ninety-nine has three covers of maps from the Fifties for driving in Tunisia, Hong Kong and the Dominican Republic.
The inter-state freeway system created the decline of the road map, covers resorted to simple clean graphics and a highway clover-leaf was a favorite. By 1980 this oil company's below-the-line marketing tool was gone.
The book's landscape size is ideal for showing off the lovely art on these historical covers from the Twenties onwards. Many show a bird' s-eye view of a company's gas station, Sinclair Oil used this feature on many of its maps. The book is a celebration of the free concertina-folded road map.
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