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I made a new Flickr set of some sections of maps from a fairly complete set (I've never checked to be sure, but whenever I wanted a state to be there, it was) of 1940 gas station maps of the US, Canada, and Mexico. (Clicking on an image will take you to the flickr set.)

Colorado 1940 (north)

They are large. Just imagine trying to drive while looking at one. The New York map took eleven scans to cover the whole thing, and once I had all the pieces, they wouldn't let themselves be composited. They wouldn't line up – things changed size. I don't know how to explain, but I worked and worked at it and finally gave it up. I did persist long enough to stitch two sections together to cover the area I'm in.

California 1940

The original scans are rather large — 15MB, 20MB, some even more — but I wanted to make desktops from them for myself and some friends and relations, so I would enlarge and reduce in Photoshop until I had an optimal looking area and then I made screen shots. They're much more tractable, filesizewise. The largest available size should be suitable for a desktop image.

New York 1940

Today I had the novel idea of sharing them with the invisible audience in Flickrland (and LJ Land). They're a window into a slightly less developed time with slower speed limits and more unpaved roads. They have a lot of town names that have been subsumed into cities (or in the case of Stout, Colorado, flooded by a reservoir). I hope you'll enjoy them.
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Date: 2012-01-14 06:55 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kip-w.livejournal.com
You mean in stitching them together? I tried to scan them all at 90 degree multiples from each other, but doing that as nearly as I could wasn't good enough, so I had to do micro-rotations by trial and error. When they were lined up that way, I ran into the unexpected glitch that scans made in the same session from the same scanner and the same original wouldn't be the same size! I got three or four things joined together, using the expedient of fudging some town dots a little, but it just resulted in the eventual problem of a tile that simply wouldn't work nohow.

So I adjusted my philosophy and decided not to care, and leave the tiles separate, and try not to mind it. If I had an auto-tiling program on this computer, I might let it have a shot at it, but one is on my old PC and the other is on Cathy's iPad, and I doubt either one would work with this MacBook.

Sometimes adjusting the philosophy is the best solution.

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