Book Review: Hitting the Road: The Art of the American Road Map

Follow the concertina road

This is a good example of those delightful books that Chronicle used to publish before they got heavily involved in pc designed titles. The pages are a treat to look at and the choice of the two hundred maps first class.

Two of Robert Lee's wonderful license plate paintings are included for Shell maps of New York and Missouri and I always thought it odd that license plates weren't used on more maps as a design motif. A favorite illustration was the companies gas station, frequently from a bird's eye perspective. Pages eighty-four and five have a beautiful painting of a Sinclair unit.

Yorke and Margolies cover the history of the free oil-company maps with easy to read copy and they both obviously regret the passing of this colorful marketing product. The chapter titled 'Freeway's end: the road map folds' has some maps from the seventies and early eighties showing their covers with simple corporate graphics (mostly abstract) and that was it, the golden age had well and truly ended and with satnav as standard we'll never see a road map again.

I find it hard to believe that this seems to be the only book to cover the subject (and so well) and another reason to find a copy for your shelves.

Hitting the Road: The Art of the American Road Map is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Title spread.

Imprint and Contents. A clever design idea to use points on a road for the various chapters.

Left: brilliant painting by Robert Lee, one of two in the book.

Lovely bird's eye view illustration of a Sinclair station.

Corporate graphics and the end was near.

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