The American West, brought to you by Shell

TitleAsk Shell!
CreatorDon Bloodgood
Year[1948-1955]
Dimensions43 × 58 cm
LocationLeventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library
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The road trip shown on this map begins in the bottom left corner at a Shell station, where patrons are getting their car tuned up, filling up their gas tanks, and leaving with directions for their trip. Along the way, the road trippers encounter all sorts of adventures and foibles, from a dead battery to confusing road sign, are solved with the help of Shell—a legend on the map's reverse side labels the scenarios shown in the various illustrations with corresponding services provided by the oil company.

Watch a conversation with Judith Tyner and Garrett Nelson in Angles on Bending Lines.

This map isn't really a map at all, at least not one of a real place. Instead, it's an imaginary mashup of the American West, the iconic landscape for the family road trips which became a rite of passage for many Americans in the postwar years, when this was published. A mutually reinforcing relationship between map publishers, oil and gas companies, automobile manufacturers, and tourist boards during this period made the road map one of the most recognizable forms of popular cartography. (, ) As the reverse side of this pictorial map notes, Shell offered route-planning guides, lodging directories, and “accurate maps, drawn by expert cartographers and revised each year” for adventure-ready motorists.

Bibliography

Akerman 2002
James R. Akerman, “American Promotional Road Mapping in the Twentieth Century,” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 29, no. 3 (January 2002): 175–192. doi:10.1559/152304002782008459
Ristow 1964
Walter W. Ristow, “A half-century of oil-company road maps,” Surveying and Mapping 24, no. 4 (1964): 617-37.