I've bought a book. It's a very big book. Sometimes, these things happen. The book's contents are arranged in alphabetical order, and its very first entry is headed "A-Z Street Map of London." This concerns the creation of writer and painter Phyllis Pearsall (1906-96) who got lost in the capital one day in 1935. She decided not let that happen again:
Enlisting the services of James Duncan, a draughtsman who worked for her cartographer father, and setting up her own office in a bedsit in Horsferry Road, she spend more than a year walking the streets of the capital, covering 3,000 on foot, identifying and locating 23,000 streets, roads, squares, avenues, alleyways and cul-de-sacs, and creating her own map.
Unable to find a publisher willing to invest in the project, Mrs Pearsall formed the Georgraphers' Map Company and produced the first edition herself in 1936, paying for the initial print run of 10,000 copies and delivering the first batch to W.H. Smith in a wheelbarrow. It was an instant success and has dominated the UK market ever since.
From The London Encyclopaedia, available from my local independent bookshop and maybe from yours too.
