When you first get to LA

You buy a Thomas Guide.

At least, that was the case up until a couple of years ago.  On the first page of every How to Be an Actor (a.k.a. Waitress) in LA book were two instructions:

1. Get thee to the Sam French
2. Pick up a Thomas Guide

So I popped into a bookstore, purchased a Not For Tourists (NFT, LA 2006 edition; did they stop making those too?) and my spiral-bound, twenty pound Thomas Guide.

It was truly indispensable for apartment-hunting.  I'd slam on the brakes somewhere around Koreatown (Craigslist neighborhoods were Greek to me at that point) and the little grid system would help me find my way to each potential dream home's address.  It also assisted later on when I was driving from audition to audition, flipping that massive book back and forth and putting everyone on the streets in grave danger.  Often I'd arrive only to discover I had not allotted enough travel time and wouldn't make my appointment at all.  This is when I'd begin to cry at the steering wheel, smearing my expensive photo paper headshots.  Ah, those were the days.

So where did the big map book go?  Perhaps the advent of GPS and iPhones have rendered them useless?  Did the company fail to get with the times?

I googled "thomas guides" and discovered that they were created by the Thomas brothers, cartographers who started out making little folding maps and guidebooks for California in the 1940s, which paved the way for the beloved atlas books to follow.  They created a unique page-by-page grid system that was adopted by so many throughout the West.  Yellow Pages would list their page and grid locations in their ads, and many Angelenos still remember their childhood home's coordinates. 

Here's what an older page looks like:

So in the back of the guide would be the listing of the street addresses by name and then broken down by number (say, W. Sunset Blvd. 8000-9000) with the page number and coordinates to see exactly where on the page you were headed.

It appears that a few years back Rand McNally and Co. bought Thomas Bros. Maps and that kind of assisted in their decline.  As did several unfortunate CEOs and a whole lotta outsourcing to India.

Some of the guides are still produced today but apparently the quality has diminished.  Sad.  I wish I'd kept mine around, if anything to see what has changed in the years I was away.  But I chucked that twenty pound paperweight on my cross-country drive to New York City. 

At least I've got an iPhone.