After years of GPS and online maps taking the lead over ‘old-fashioned’ paper maps, map-maker Rand McNally is reporting a big resurgence in sales of maps, up 20% last year over 2021.
The company attributes this partly to a surge in road trips since the beginning of the pandemic, and to paper maps giving a richer experience, showing an entire area and not just the immediate screen travelers are passing through, as well as allowing visual plotting of routes and finding points of interest.
The company is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its U.S.A. Road Atlas this year with an anniversary edition that includes reviews of how travel has changed since the first ‘Rand McNally Auto Chum’ in 1924, a chart of fuel prices by decade, and a montage of past-year atlas covers.
Among the things the original atlas didn’t have, by the way, were road numbers in addition to names, indexes to locate cities on the maps, or colored maps; only red and blue were used.
