Geographia Map Company

The Geographia Map Company is an independently owned U.S. publisher of road maps, atlases and wall maps. The company is based in Hackensack, New Jersey.

History
Geographia was founded in 1911 by Alexander Gross (1879 – March23, 1958), a native of Austria-Hungary who had established Geographia, Ltd, a commercial map publisher located at No. 55 Fleet Street in London. War maps were in great demand during World War I, so Gross set out to publish as many of these as he could. Among these were maps covering the Gallipoli campaign, Verdun to Belfort, Russia, the Near East, and the Italy&mdash;Germany&mdash;Austria region. Other wartime efforts included "The Daily Telegraph War Map of the British Front" and "The Daily Telegraph Pocket Atlas of the War." In the war's immediate aftermath, the company produced "The Daily Telegraph Victory Atlas of the World" in forty-eight weekly installments. An index gazetteer which accompanied the victory map contained more than 250,000 place names. Gross provided a full-color 1200 sqin map for the 1917 edition of the South American Year Book.

Arriving in the United States in 1928, Gross initially had the new Geographia produce maps of the New York metropolitan area, and later expanded the company's focus into neighboring urban areas. Beginning in the 1940s, Geographia was headquartered in the Corbin Building, located at 11 John Street in New York City. The company entered a period of rapid growth, introducing world maps and atlases, topical maps detailing aspects of World War II, and a catalog of atlases, street guide books ("Red Books"), travel guides ("Famous Guides"), wall maps, and street atlases covering dozens of cities in the United States and Canada. In 1953, it published the first new map believed to have been made of the Soviet Union in 12 years.

By the late 1980s, the company was owned by the Polak family and sold a million maps per year. Based at 231 Hackensack Plank Road in Weehawken, New Jersey, it was purchased by the Rand McNally Corporation, and then re-purchased by its original owners several years later. Now based in Hackensack, Geographia publishes a number of folded maps, guidebooks, atlases, and wall maps focusing on the greater New York metropolitan area.

Scope
The company's maps are based on information gleaned from various government sources, including official surveys and aerial photographs, but it also relied on tips from average citizens. Gross was known to wander throughout New York City in search of obscure streets to add into his maps.

In addition to its international portfolio, which included maps of London and Paris, by the 1950s Geographia maps had been introduced for Akron, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco and Washington (DC). Dozens of other locations were covered, including Buffalo, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Atlanta, Atlantic City, Binghamton, Birmingham (AL), Charleston (SC), Cleveland, Gary, Grand Rapids, Honolulu, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Louisville, Miami, Montreal, Milwaukee, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Norfolk (VA), Oakland (CA), Oklahoma City, Omaha, Philadelphia, Portland (OR), Providence, Richmond (VA), St. Louis, San Diego, Seattle, Syracuse, Toledo, Toronto and Wilmington (DE). These folded map titles were housed within a cardstock cover featuring photography of each city's skyline on the front cover, and an alphabetical listing of Geographia's catalog on the rear cover. The maps themselves were large-scale, full color on the detail side, black-and-white on the reverse. Each featured Geographia's characteristic style of cartography, which resembled that of both the forerunner Geographia, Ltd., and the subsequent Geographer's A-Z (also based in the UK). These maps were often distributed by local newsagents, a strategy also employed by a number of Geographia's competitors.

By the end of the 1970s, the vast majority of this catalog had gone out of print, and has since become rather collectible. A handful of titles in the northeastern United States remained in print into the 1990s.