l-bratter/dt1st/mark2nd

Map History

Before Thomas Bros. came down here from the Bay Area (“Thomas Bros. Maps Chief Weighs Selling the Company,” Sept. 28), Los Angeles had its own street guide, founded in 1922 by local cartographer Jacque Renee. I met him in the late 1950s in his downtown retail store, where he displayed Thomas Bros. maps alongside his own.

Thomas had pretty much taken over this area by then, with their superior marketing skills, but hadn’t yet produced their own maps of outlying areas, such as Riverside-San Bernardino or Santa Barbara-Ventura. Renee, strictly an artisan, had stopped updating his maps, but said he’d continue to offer them until Thomas Bros. brought out their versions of those locales.

Funny Thomas is just now preparing to publish a Clark County, Nev. edition. Renee included most of it as a bonus in his San Bernardino County atlas. Because Nevada didn’t have such good public records then as California did, he told me he had personally driven the streets of Las Vegas, Henderson, and Boulder City to chart out his maps.

THOMAS D. BRATTER

Los Angeles