LETTS

Letts & Son Maps

including their successors, Mason & Payne

Thomas Letts, son of John Letts, a stationer and publisher, was based at 72 Queen Victoria St, London. In the 1860s the firm advertised in various Black’s Guides as agents for OS maps. They also sold the 16-sheet Blacks/Bartholomew quarter-inch maps under their covers. In 1870 the firm became a limited company, known as Letts, Son & Co. Ltd, based at the above address. 

In 1877 they were publishing Letts’s Bicycle Club Map of England and Wales, scale 12 miles to an inch. Although the base map originated with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge many years before, it must be one of the first to acknowledge the growing pastime. In 1879  Letts acquired the plates and copyright for the ‘Useful Knowledge’ maps, some of which were to have their lives eked out as cycling maps.

By 1880 the main offices were at 33 King William St, London Bridge and that year the firm published the first instalments of its Popular World Atlas. This was to include maps of England & Wales (6 sections), Scotland (3 sections) and Ireland (4 sections), all at 12m to an inch. The England & Wales maps were to form the basis of Letts’s Cycling Map of England & Wales. The inclusion of ‘The Height of the Mountains is expressed in Yards' .in the key confirms the map to be derived from one produced for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge earlier in the century. The 1884-dated version incorporated no special information for cyclists, though a more informative version was shortly to appear, as noted below.  

The England maps were to form the basis of the single-sheet cycling map mentioned below.

Newly advertised in 1882 was a 50 Miles Round London map – ‘showing roads in color, dangerous hills, [five-] mile circles for checking distances’. This quarter-inch to a mile map was 2/6d in case, or 5/- in case on linen – not cheap. In 1883 Letts were advertising a series of over 300 Sixpenny Maps, 17” by 14”, ‘from steel plates and neatly coloured by hand’. Their size suggests they were ex-atlas, being the same size as the following. They also sold editions of Blacks (by Bartholomew) quarter-inch maps of England & Wales, as fourteen sheets A to N, as well its Scottish equivalent.

In 1882 Letts briefly adveritised County Maps, at 6d, 1s and 2/6d, price dependent on colouring and mounting: probably bought-in stock as no further reference was made to them until 1884. The  maps were rather old-fashioned, being those engraved by the firm of John. and Charles Walker in the 1830s for an atlas based on the earlier Greenwood county maps of larger scale. These maps were of excellent quality for their day; unfortunately, as regards roads, they were now fifty years out of date. Only railways had been updated: some newer roads were missing whilst others shown were never built. Letts seemed to have acquired the plates and copyright to these maps, as in 1884 they started publication of their Popular County Atlas of England, in twelve monthly instalments, heavily promoted, each containing four maps of adjacent counties (Wales in four parts) and priced at a shilling an instalment – a remarkably low price for coloured maps. Sheet size was 17” by 14”. The county sheets were also obtainable individually, (6d folded on paper, 1s on cloth), with the complete atlas on sale from 1885. 

The maps contained a plethora of information, with coloured major roads and ‘dangerous hills’ marked, though at this time these would be provided more for coach and carriage traffic than the growing number of cyclists. Road distances between towns were indicated by notional milestones. Thus despite their antiquity they sneak into the category of early cycling maps: in fact they were branded as ‘Bicycle & Tourist Maps’. A disadvantage for cyclists was, like all maps originating as part of a county-based atlas, virtually no detail was given beyond the county boundary and of course scale varied from sheet to sheet.

Although a second edition of the County Atlas appeared in 1889, the individual county maps do not seem to have been advertised, and seem to have been allowed to fade away.

Letts & Son also sold the Cruchley half-inch maps as issued by Gall & Inglis, but under Letts covers and with an alphabetic index to the sheets running south to north: thus Aa was Sheet 1, Ba was Sheet 8 and so on up to Sheet Ld (Dunbar), corresponding to Sheet 65 of the Gall & Inglis index given on their page. The maps themselves retained their Cruchley numbers, but had the Gall & Inglis attribution covered by a Letts sticker. 

In The Cyclist Christmas Number 1884 was advertised

Letts’s Road Book of England and Wales – the whole cycling Press agrees that this publication has attained the situation of the Standard Work on this subject. For the present edition (the fourth) the author has carefully revised every page, and embodied all the information supplied by reliable local roadsmen down to June 1884. 423 pages, limp cloth. For Saddle, with special Road Map (size 32” by 28”) 6s: Ditto, without the road map, 5s.

This actually was Charles Howard’s The Roads of England & Wales, initially published by Letts in 1882; this was also published by Iliffe & Son and later by H. Grube. Also advertised were 

• Letts’s Cycling Map of 50 Miles Round London. All roads, main and minor. Dangerous hills in bright red. Fourth edition, 1884 season. Paper in small case 2s 6d, mounted in Ditto 3s 6d. This was actually by Bartholomew, using their standard quarter-inch mapping and later (c. 1900) sold by H. Grube and others.
• Letts’s Cycling Map of England & Wales. Compiled from the Ordnance and Local Surveys to show the roads.  Main roads in yellow; cross-roads in black: hills by shading: danger spots in bright red. Scale 12 mile to the inch. Size, 32 inches by 38. Thick paper on linen, in case 10s 6d; sheet 5s; thin tough paper, uncoloured, in case, 2s 6d. 

From the summer of 1885 Letts advertised Charles Howard’s The Handy Route Book of England and Wales – ‘being a complete Key to the Main Roads, both direct and cross’, in three one-shilling volumes. This was intended to be a more concise and portable version of the author’s earlier work. Volume 1 Southern England, was published in 1885, Volume 2, The Midlands, in 1888. It is unlikely that an intended Volume 3 ever appeared.

In 1885 Letts, Son & Co. Ltd went liquidation and their cartographic interests were acquired by a newly set-up firm, Mason & Payne (Payne a former manager at Letts), of 41 Cornhill, London whilst commercial stationery was now handled by Cassell. Both companies retained the Letts name for well-established and ongoing products. The former Cruchley half-inch series by them were now termed The Cycling Map of England & Wales.

In 1887 Mason & Payne published The Roads of Scotland (soon renamed The Itinerary and Road Book of Scotland) by Charles Howard, a companion volume to his earlier Roads of England & Wales, now in its fourth edition, and a second edition of Letts’s Popular County Atlas. but not, apparently, the individual county maps. The same year they were also advertising

• England & Wales 2m to 1 inch, 60 sheets, each covering approx. 48 miles by 40 miles, 1s 6d, mounted on cloth, 3s 6d. These were the ex-Cruchley maps referred to above. In some advertisements given as 65 sheets and described as Cycling Maps, with roads coloured
• Letts’s Cycling Map of 50 miles around London
• Mason & Payne’s Map of the Country East of London
• Mason & Payne’s Map of the Country West of London
• Mason & Payne’s Cycling Map of England & Wales (12m to an inch)
• Mason & Payne’s Cycling Map of The British Isles (a disinterred Georgian map)

To these were added, advertised later in the year,

• England & Wales 4m to 1 inch, 14 sheets approx. 100 miles by 80 miles, 2s 6d, mounted on cloth 4s 6d ‒ probably the Bartholomew/Blacks series (omitting the two ‘makeweight’ sheets). These had also been advertised by Letts a few years earlier. As with the Cruchley maps, the sheets were referenced by a letter rather than a number.

By 1888 the three London-area maps were no longer advertised, but a new map – Ordnance Map of the Roads between London and Brighton – had been added, pocket size, 1/-. There was a Special Road Map of England & Wales, in four sheets. The Cruchley and Blacks' maps had been dropped, at least from the advertisements. To the Letts’s Travelling Map of England & Wales were companion maps of Scotland and Ireland. From 1889 all the maps now listed were also published by Hutchinson and Co., 25 Paternoster Square, London, a company newly formed. In the same year Mason & Payne moved from Cornhill to 7 Gracechurch St. The company seems to have faded away around the end of the century.