Thomas Guide - History

History

Thomas Bros. Maps, the publishers of the Thomas Guide, was started in Oakland, California, in 1915 by cartographer George Coupland Thomas and his two brothers, who were business partners. 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.

After George Coupland Thomas died in 1955, the ownership was bought by Coupland Thomas' family lawyer Warren B. Wilson, brother of Lionel Wilson, the past mayor of Oakland, California. During the big California home development boom of the late '70s Wilson moved the company to a newly built state-of-the-art designed building in the industrial park area Irvine, California, in the early 1980s. For 40 years Wilson served as CEO and owner of Thomas Bros. Maps 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 traveling and studying his love of art.

In this new growth period of the early 1990s the company led the way and did a lot of new innovative things in the map industry. They were the first map company to start a map education foundation that trained teachers on geography and interesting map lessons and donated map materials to area schools. They were also the first map publishing company to set up a computer map database that could have sections checked out by cartographers, updated, and them checked back in a live digital map library with date stamps to keep track of what was edited. They also solved many software digital mapping problems that other companies still use today. And they were the first map company to set up a digital map page and grid look-up system for the whole world. Many old-time TBM map book users can still tell you what page and grid they live on even though they stopped using the map books years ago.

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 California CHP, large utilities, and many area cities and counties. The Thomas Brothers map database had a monopoly in the '90s since they had the best street addresses in them making them very good for address matching for businesses. As sales of its last produced guidebooks for Washington, DC, and Virginia did not sell as expected and much money was lost on the website store design, the company was in major debt, and was purchased by and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Rand McNally in 1999. The company took a new radical direction in November 2003 and let go many of Thomas Brothers' most skilled cartographers and employees.

After this very large layoff, 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 India 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 after 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 old and derelict now. Rand McNally now buys their map data and updates from the big map digital data companies like Teleatlas and Navteq. They overlay the new streets on their old database for publication.

Past TBM employees still wonder where the company would be if they had not been sold to Rand McNally but sold to somebody on the west coast. Also, if the company had not spread itself so thin and stayed focused on current sales areas and data sales. Many believe the constant change in CEOs and product line directions in the last 15 years killed the company. Rand McNally/TBM no longer has any employees or customer service in California, after laying off the final Irvine headquarters employees in 2009.