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Wed, 12/05/2007

How? by Mark Ovenden:

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So the book had a subject, a publisher and a date….but the content – transit maps from all over the world had yet not been approved for use!

With a decision taken to include the official maps of something like 150 cities, a list of the transit operators began to look like the invitations to some kind of international transportation conference! From Atlanta to Zurich, Berlin to Yokohama letters needed to go out – in the local language – to request permission to reproduce their maps.

This as you might guess turned out to be the Achilles heel of the book! Though I could get away with writing in English and my dreadfully amateurish French to over half the cities, Hindi, Korean and Russian were not in my fluencies. I managed to track down German, Spanish, Greek and even Portuguese speakers among my extended circle of friends…but some of the more exotic languages were a stumbling block. So I turned to the multi-cultural restaurants of London and began walking round with an English letter in one hand and a huge leap of faith in the other.

(CAPTION: A letter asking for permission to reproduce their maps - courtesy of a London Chinese restaurant!)

Thankfully a number of extremely kind restaurant workers took pity on my plight and soon I had letters translated to send to far flung cities as Kolkata, Jakarta, Taipei, Yekaterinburg, Kawasaki and Rome, to name but a few.

At an early stage of pulling together ideas for this book I came to realize that I was less an expert than an enthusiastic amateur with the tenacity to try and pull off the world first collection of transit maps. The rude awakening – as is so often the case with any over-inflated ego issues - was prompted by a good friend. I’d had the great good fortune to come across a genuine professional expert in my amateurish and frequent visits to the London Transport Museum. Mike Ashworth was an incredibly knowledgeable and affable chap who seemed to be somewhat inspired by my enthusiasm and we spent many hours pouring over old transit maps together; mainly at his home where over the years he built up a collection to rival and indeed usurp my humble offering.

Mike introduced me to the right people at the Museum and I was incredibly humbled to find that they were happy to lend their support to my project. This was an enormous fillip to the project and opened many doors. From day one I had hope to be given permission to use the exquisite font that London Transport had been using, albeit in enhanced digital form, since 1917; the Edward Johnston typeface which carried his surname and has become a kind of handwriting for London itself. After presenting my rough Microsoft Word documents to David Ellis the head of Intellectual Property Rights I was absolutely bowled over when he agreed that it would be permissible for me to use the font in the layout of the book! This was an incredibly rare honor as LT quite rightly guards their IP very closely.
(CAPTION: Original 1917 sheet of the London Underground Johnston font)

So armed with the Johnston Font, the support of the London Transport Museum and the intellectual brain power of Mr. Ashworth, I made the next wise move: to approach the transport industries official organization, the UITP. They were extremely helpful and following a visit to their Brussels headquarters one chilly Spring morning in 2002, Mike and I secured an official “Introduction” to the book from the Secretary Hans Rat and brought back a plethora of new possibilities, mainly historic maps, to include in the book from the highly helpful UITP Library.

Over the next few months I continued the research and swapped emails withy many other map collectors from round the world including Robert Reed, Hans Reidel, Peter Lloyd, Max Roberts and Robert Schwandl. Finally after copious re-writes of my text and as the letters of agreement poured in from every corner fo the world, the book was ready to be assembled…..and this will be covered in the next blog!