Spiral-Bound for Los Angeles

Words by Peter Hauge

Matthew Greenberg was a realtor in Los Angeles. I only met him once. But I have his 1987 Thomas Guide.

There’s a post-it on Map 14 (this is using the old grid; more on that later) about a property on Saticoy. Map 23 is dog-eared. Maps 42 and 43 are holding on for dear life by just a few spirals. And written across the white and purple cover is the name Greenberg.

In 2012, Matthew Greenberg was trying to sell the Mt. Washington home of John Feathers (Map 595, B2). However, before he could show the house, he needed it cleaned out.

And that's where things got tricky.

Filling the house to the point of almost being a part of the structure itself were wall-to-wall maps. Folded maps from gas stations, auto clubs, souvenir shops. And of course, in Los Angeles, no obsessive map collection would be complete without a multitude of Thomas Guides. Matthew knew this hoard of maps was too good to toss, and so he put in a call to the Los Angeles Public Library and made an offer: the library could have all of the maps, free of charge, as long as they could take them all, and quickly. All told, hundreds of thousands of maps recovered from the home went straight to the Los Angeles Public Library under the supervision of my predecessor and LA map legend, Glen Creason. Over 550 Thomas Guides were received from the Feathers home, bringing the library’s total count to over 1100 guides.

The story of the Thomas Bros. Maps started in Oakland in 1915 when George Coupland Thomas and his two brothers got into the map making business. They would later go on to set up shop in Los Angeles in the 40s where their maps would become a cartographic cultural icon.

George Coupland passed away in 1955, after which Warren Willson, Coupland’s attorney, acquired the company and continued producing the Guides. Rand McNally would later come to own the Thomas Guides in 1999. Ironically, the 2025 Eaton Fire would consume the McNally mansion.

Although I was one of the volunteers Glen had called on to help move the maps from Mt. Washington to the library, my first real experience with the Thomas Guide was somewhere in the mid 90s. I was 15 years old, sitting on the couch somewhere around 596, F2 on the outskirts of Temple City. It was the start of my summer break, and my mom had called The Screen Bee to replace some window screens.

Ace Ventura had just gotten onto the case, when my mom walked in and said, “I got you a job, get up!”, and for the summer I was the co-pilot for Bruce and his mobile screen service, The Screen Bee. I was making five bucks an hour, under the table. It’s still the best job I ever had.

Close-up of Map 634 - Downtown Los Angeles

You see, MapQuest was already on the rise and the Guides were already something of an anachronism. Hell, I don’t think I had looked at one in years, and that would have just been for want of something to read while my mom was inside Safeway. But Bruce was still a man on the go, and his dispatch (his wife) would call throughout the day with an address for the next job. For $5 an hour, I was a bargain GPS.

We spent about five minutes on how it worked, and it really doesn’t take much longer than that. He showed me the simple index, “You’re here ... Map 596, F2. They’re not pages. They’re MAPS. It’s not page 596, it’s Map 596. You see this grid?”

Indeed, every page, er, map, of a Thomas Guide has numbers running along the side and letters along the bottom. Bruce gave me a rundown on the grid.

Easy peasy. Like playing Battleship. Then he told me the address of our next job, which was a little house in Pasadena (566, B2).

Cover of the New Map of Downtown Los Angeles published by Thomas Bros. Maps

When you get to the edge of any map, in the middle of the margins, you’ll see the number of the corresponding page (map!).

Clever, right?

Freeway on-ramps and off-ramps get their own special, and handy page. And DTLA gets its very own 1:21,190 scale map, since even the congested quagmire of Downtown needs more detail than the standard page can comfortably show.

The Thomas Guides were such a symbol of LA that I challenge you to find anyone over 40 who doesn’t have at least some memory of The Guide. If you were living, operating, or playing in LA, you needed one. It was a non-negotiable piece of equipment to have in your car, along with your spare tire and jack.

Party invitations would go out with the map and grid number of the location instead of even attempting to write directions. It’s handy to note that emergency vehicles in California are still required to keep a copy of the Thomas Guide in their rigs at all times, should the need arise.

The guides were incredibly popular in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. So much so that the LA/OC guide remains the only Thomas Guide still being updated regularly (although I hear the San Diego ‘25/’26 drops soon). The Guides expanded across Southern California, then north, then east. Phoenix and other cities had their runs, but none ever got the traction of those in LA. Maryland, DC, Washington, and Oregon also had their time with the Guides. But nowhere did they catch on like in Southern California.

Rand McNally edition of the San Diego County Thomas Guides from 2004 boasting a digital edition CD-Rom inside

The bulk of the Guides’ covers were usually printed in a single color on cardstock. Prior to this covers were plastic, and I can attest they did not age well and are very brittle. The plastic covers were phased out in the mid-sixties. The Thomas Bros. Street Guides, not to be confused with the atlases, were block paperbacks, conveniently sized, but unwieldy while driving. The large, floppy pages of the spiral-bound editions made them ideal for draping over the knee or keeping open on the passenger seat or dash. Nobody said these things weren’t distracting. If you think Waze is bad, try getting from LAX to Long Beach at night with nothing but a guide. Scary times, my friends.

A favorite of mine is the 1976 edition. The bicentennial was in full swing, and the Thomas Guide was not to be left out of the patriotic hullabaloo that was sweeping the nation. Pulling out all the stops, Thomas Bros. splurged for red AND blue on a white cover, making it one of the most colorful editions before the design overhaul.

And now they’re cool again. Maybe even a little trendy. And is it any surprise? Vinyl is back. DVDs are back. People are tired of their phones. And so they are once again drawn to the spiral-bound siren-song of the Thomas Guides. While the trend of digital detoxing certainly plays a role here, there is something to be said about the tangibility, reliability, and permanence of a map whose details don’t change regardless of how closely you’re zoomed in, or disappear depending on your signal strength. It’s all the fallible variables of technology (battery life, speed, reception) that Thomas Guides, and any physical maps, scoff at. Recent and recurring fires regularly expose the flaws and shortcomings of relying on cellular networks for navigation, and so it always seems that interest in The Guides piques in the wake of calamities.

The guides went through a controversial change in the 1990s. They moved from their age-old, tried and true analog cartography to computer-generated maps. The “Intelligent Maps” also meant a change to the grid system. So good ol’ Map 44, Downtown LA, became and has remained 634. Thankfully, a key to the change was included in subsequent editions for several years.

Map 634 is always a sight: Downtown, Dodger Stadium, the stack interchange. And speaking of stacks, Thomas Guides make for the perfect onion skin to peel back layers of time. Turn to Map 634 today and stack it with an older guide. Stack ‘em if ya got ‘em! And year by year, you’ll see the city appear and disappear.

Two years ago, I received a call from Marilyn Greenberg, the mother of the same Matthew who tipped the library off to the Feathers House. Marilyn, also a former librarian, went on to tell me that the Feathers house, and making the front page of the LA Times, were the high points in her son’s career. Whose wouldn’t it be? She was still beaming with pride when she pulled out a preserved copy of the paper featuring Matthew in the Feather’s house.

Marilyn explained to me that on the morning of October 15th, Matthew made his morning cup of coffee, sat down on his couch, and passed away. She said it was as if an angel simply touched him on the shoulder and called him to God. We met in her apartment on Fairfax, somewhere around Map 593. Or maybe it was 633. And I listened to her tell me about Matthew as I packed up his maps.

As he was first to hear about the house, he had first dibs on anything inside. Matthew didn’t take much: a few maps of Chicago, Israel, some National Geographics. In fact, it’s hard to know which maps were from the Feathers house and which were just Matthew’s personal maps. Because as far as I can tell, like most people, and like me, Matthew also had a thing for maps.

But unquestionably this 1987 Thomas Guide was Matthew’s. Battered, beaten, and well worn with the road wear of LA. To thumb through it gives about as much feeling of familiarity as if you were to find an old phone book. There are occasional pages that were obviously referenced heavily and often, but the rest of the Guide shows an even amount of wear, consistent with a successful realtor scrambling around LA.

It’s not unusual to see these tomes clipped together with complicated networks of binder clips, chips clips (surprisingly effective), and rubber bands, all designed to make flipping back and forth between pages effortless. The Thomas Guides allowed for a lot of personalization, and some of the best donations that come through the library are the guides with a little more road wear than usual.

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