Thomas Guide

Thomas Guide is a series of paperback, spiral-bound atlases featuring detailed street maps of various large metropolitan areas in the United States, including Boise, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Oakland, Phoenix, Portland, Reno-Tahoe, Sacramento, San Francisco, Seattle, Tucson, and Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area.

Each guide has a detailed index of streets and points of interest, as well as arterial maps for easy page location.

By the late 1940s, the company had added pocket-sized guidebooks of California and the city of San Francisco which included fold-out maps attached to the inner rear cover.

The first street guides, which were initially pocket sized paperback booklets also began to appear at about this time, and were introduced for several counties in California, and one in Washington.

For 40 years, Wilson served as CEO and owner of Thomas Bros. Maps (TBM) and was responsible for leading the company into the digital age.

Starting in the 1990s, Wilson hired many CEOs to run the company to give him more time for traveling and studying his love of art.

Because sales of its last produced guidebooks[clarification needed] for Washington, D.C., and Virginia did not sell as expected and much money was lost on the website store design, the company was in major debt.

[1] The company made radical changes in operation beginning in November 2003, and let go many of Thomas Brothers' most skilled cartographers and employees.

As communities infilled and expanded during the post-war[clarification needed] period, this presented problems because the early base maps did not account for the Earth's curvature.

Large wall maps were mosaics of smaller units making street alignment interesting.

In addition, the Thomas Brothers digital database can be licensed to companies and governments to use as a base map for geographical information systems applications.

A wide variety of products were produced for sales planning, dispatching, routing, real estate listings and territorial assignments.

Besides the regular annual street atlases, they also produced wall maps, Zip Code guides, Rock Products Zones, and Census Tract editions.