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[kip_w]

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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.)



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.



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.



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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Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. I've seen maps of this kind and era before, but I don't mind looking at them again. Hampton Roads is particularly interesting to look at, as it's changed so tremendously, both administratively and in bridge-building, since then. Will you be adding more?

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I could. Have a request? Did you see the rest of them?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Cool cool cool!

But -- screen shots? Not resizing, cropping, and saving as jpg? Photoshop takes enough aggressive shortcuts with previews that I'd worry about how that would look.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

The original scans are intact. I used screen shots as a way of quickly getting a section from the scan that exactly fit my screen. I need to do something about the USA map, though. The version I grabbed and put on flickr makes my eyes swim.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I saw the 17, I think it was, that you had up as of last night.

Since you already put up both Seattle and LA, I'd be most interested in my own stomping grounds between them, Northern California and western Oregon.

Another curious factor would be the spaces that would shortly be cleared out for the Manhattan Project, which would require looking at eastern Washington, northern New Mexico, and eastern Tennessee. But whatever, when you have time.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I am interested in the way you attacked the problem and the various things you tried that didn't work. Do you have notes on this or anything to share?

K.

[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.

[geckoman.livejournal.com]

Let's see if I can get a comment posted now...I kept getting an error message earlier.
OK...Don't forget the 'Major Hoople' project.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's more of an "Out Our Way" project.

I just need to find a way to do it all faster. Fixing up the art is what takes 90 percent of the time involved — yellowing newsprint with (so far not fading) print, and the brown print-through from the rubber cement beneath. And the printing had lots of dropouts and random specks to begin with.

But yeah, more projects get started than finished. I need an intern.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My mother was enthralled, to put it mildly, by sight of the map of southern Michigan at the time she was living there at the age of ten. Thanks again for these.