Have you ever heard the story about how the London A-Z map book came about? No? Neither did I but it is quite extraordinary.
The woman that created the map was Phyllis Pearsall. She got lost on a rainy autumn evening in London in 1935. After that happened, she was determined never to get lost again, so she did the obvious thing – go to buy a map. Incredibly, the most up to date map she could find was 20 years out of date.
She decided to do something about it and embarked on what seems like a completely hair brained plan to map the streets of London. As a lady of leisure from a wealthy family she had plenty of time for the task which ended up taking a year. It was an extraordinary year. She would rise at 5 in the morning and walk street after street for 18 hours a day making a total of 23,000 street sketches. People would follow her around as word spread about this lady walking the streets drawing in a book. When all of the street work was done, Phyllis then set about creating a book from all of her work. She pretty much did everything by herself – choosing the paper for the book, the typeface, proofreading, designing the cover and coming up with the name (she called it A-Z because that’s all she could think of).
The next task was to take her masterpiece to bookshops and get it on the shelves. She got virtually no interest in her work. Undeterred, she decided to form a company to publish and distribute the book. She took a gamble on an initial print run of 10,000 copies even though she had no orders. Her first big order came from WH Smith who took batch of 250 on sale or return. These were delivered by Phyllis in a wheelbarrow!
The rest is history of course. The A-Z has gone on to be one of the all time bestsellers in publishing history with over 65 million copies sold, making Phyllis a millionaire.
Shows an incredible amount of determination on the part of Phyllis, or maybe foolhardiness? Printing 10,000 books in the 1930s without any orders definitely was an expensive undertaking. Not many would do it. Luckily, Phyllis was from a well to do background so money didn’t appear to be an obstacle.
One wonders if there was a Dragons’ Den back then, would Phyllis have got an investment? Would you have invested? Would you have walked 3,000 and taken a gamble on getting the books printed? Food for thought.
