FRONTIER - Maphead - page 165

into the budding transportation industry, producing railroad tickets, guides, and timetables.
The company was very nearly destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871, but quick-thinking
cofounder William Rand saved the day , rescuing two ticket-printing machines from the
flames and burying them in the cool sand at a Lake Michigan beach three miles north of
the city, where they'd be safe from the 3,000-degree inferno. Just three days later, before
a survey had even been completed of the still-smoldering city, the buried machines were
up and running in a rented building that had survived the flames. The very next year, Rand
McNally printed its first map, a railway map of the United States and Canada, and the rest
is history.
When I asked a Rand McNally publicist if I could stop by for a visit, I hoped its
headquarters would retain some of the musty mid-century charm I associate with its
maps—would cavernous brick vaults full of whirring printing presses be too much to ask?
Instead my cab pulls up to an anonymous office park in suburban Skokie. I don't even see
the iconic Rand McNally logo—a compass superimposed on an elliptical globe—until I'm
in the lobby trying to figure out which floor reception is on.
“We finally moved out of the old place four months ago,” explains Jane Szczepaniak,
the assistant who arranged my visit. The company's two hundred employees don't seem
to miss the windowless painted cinder-block walls and faded green filing cabinets of their
longtime home. “It felt like an elementary school,” Jane jokes. In the move, fifty years of
old map film were tossed, and employees were invited to pillage a disorganized, dimly lit
room full of thousands of past Rand McNally maps. Once everyone had a few souvenirs,
the rest were thrown away.
Joel Minster, a former civil engineer, has been chief cartographer at Rand McNally for
the past nine years. His office looks decidedly modern, with blue Earth hemispheres pro-
truding from the walls as if they'd been beamed there by a Star Trek transporter, but he's
adamant that old-fashioned paper maps are still Rand McNally's focus—for the moment.
When I ask about the maps on the Rand McNally website, which still scroll and zoom
chunkilyinfixedincrements , likeMapQuestin1999,hesmileswryly.“We'regivingthose
away for free, so it's not really our goal to be number one.” But even though road atlases
sold to truckers and vacationers still pay the bills, he says that the company will keep a
presence in GPS devices and e-reader atlases and smart-phone apps—not necessarily be-
cause it thinks those are the future but to have a toe in the water just in case. In fifteen or
twenty years, he vows, “Rand McNally will still be in the business of travel planning. I
have no idea what media we'll be using to deliver that information—a chip in your brain,
sure—but we'll be there.”
Despite my long history with paper maps, I wind up convinced by Minster's optimism:
there will be nothing to lament when some new platform eventually replaces them, since
that new technology, whatever it is, will by definition have to do all the things that paper
maps do well. It will have to be portable and immediately intuitive. It will have to ac-