Rand McNally
| Rand McNally | |
|---|---|
| legal form | Limited Liability Company |
| founding | 1856 |
| Seat | Skokie , Illinois , USA |
| Website | http://randmcnally.com |
Rand McNally is an American publisher of maps , atlases , globes and navigation systems .
The company has been based in Skokie , Illinois , a suburb of Chicago , since 1952 . Rand McNally has an office in Irvine , California and the delivery center is in Richmond , Kentucky .
history
From printing to card publishing
The company was founded in Chicago in 1856 by William H. Rand as a printing company, in 1868 he made the printer Andrew McNally , who had immigrated from Ireland and who had been his employee since 1858, a co-owner. In 1869, Rand and McNally published the first edition of the Western Railway Guide , a handbook of train routes from the Chicago railroad hub. A map was added to its annual edition in 1872 for the first time. In 1876 Rand and McNally printed their first atlas. In 1899 William Rand left the company; Andrew McNally became the sole owner. He and his descendants expanded the business of maps and atlases more and more; Rand McNally (the name of the founder remained part of the company's name) became the card publisher. As early as 1904, the publisher brought the first road map onto the market, the New Automobile Road Map of New York City & Vicinity . Newspaper printing was abandoned, but geography textbooks and books on geography and travel continued to be published, including Kon-Tiki: across the Pacific by raft by Thor Heyerdahl .
The Rand McNally Road Atlas
The Rand McNally Road Atlas was first published in 1924 , initially under the title Rand McNally Auto Chum , then as the Auto Road Atlas of the United States . Since 1926 it also contained road maps of the provinces of Canada , as a result it was temporarily distributed as Rand McNally North American Road Atlas .
"The Rand McNally", as it was soon widely known, quickly developed into the best-selling automobile atlas in the USA and the publisher's flagship product. The name of the product stood for the manufacturer and made the publisher known nationwide. With the acceleration of motorization in the USA since the 1950s, “Rand McNally” became more or less synonymous with “Road Atlas”.
The "Rand McNally" is updated annually. The 94th edition (2017) comprises a total of 390 cards. The standard edition page size is 27.5 cm × 38.1 cm; there are also issues in larger and smaller formats. Since 2000 the publisher has also offered the Rand McNally Road Atlas in a digital version.
The Robinson projection
Rand McNally commissioned the cartographer Arthur H. Robinson to develop a suitable representation for world maps in the 1960s . This is how the Robinson projection was created for The New International Atlas (published in 1969) , which was also used by the National Geographic Society from 1988 to 1998 .
The company was family-owned until 1997 and was managed by the descendants of Andrew McNally until 1993. The publisher's extensive map archive was given to the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Footnotes
- ↑ a b c d Our History , accessed August 23, 2016.
- ↑ a b The Legend , published by the Road Map Collectors Association, Issue 32 (Spring 2006), pp. 1–2.
- ↑ Hoover's Profile: Rand McNally & Company ( December 20, 2008 memento in the Internet Archive ), accessed August 23, 2016.
