What gets bad gets better...

A much better day today...   Interesting to see how many Blipfollowers have an interest in maps.  I'm passionate about them, I read them over and over, always discovering something new or some place I want to visit.  When I was visiting the States regularly and driving all around I'd call in to the Tourist Offices on the interstate and ask for a map.  They'd hand out excellent Rand-McNally maps.  In Australia they happily give away Cartosphere maps which are excellent and fine detail too.

I was drawing maps for travel guides for a number of years, long before the OS were shamed into providing a free mapping service for publishers to build upon.  We have a lot to thank Ms Harvey and her lobby group for.  It's a long story but they(we) won.  I recall when the new OS maps came out I wanted to use a small pic (4 sq inches) in an editorial piece to promote the new 'Right to Roam series.  "No problem", they said.  "That'll be £800 please".  Actually I'm not sure they said please.  

We take maps for granted these days but it wasn't always easy to get them into print.  Anyone who knows Cumbria well may have spotted cattle grids on maps that don't actually exist or spelling mistakes on features such as streams or hills -  they are deliberate.  These are OS checks to see if you've copied their data with out paying a repro fee!  

My way around it was to buy 50 year old 'out of copyright' 2.5" maps, walk the route and update the info. 

Yellow Pages used to do something similar by putting false info in their pages to catch people copying their lists.  Anyone who looked for the Chinese take-away in Wetheral in 2001 will still be looking.  It was a data-trap.