25 September: Phyllis Pearsall (The A to Z)

This date in 1906 saw the birth of Phyllis Pearsall, creator of the A to Z map of London. Here are ten facts about Phyllis Pearsall and her creation.

1. Map making was in her blood. Her father was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who had his own cartographic business, Geographia Ltd, which produced street maps of Britain but went bankrupt.
2. The story goes that she had the idea for the A-Z map after getting lost on her way to a party in 1935, because the Ordnance Survey map she was using dated back to 1919 and was hopelessly out of date; although some sources say it wasn't a party she was going to, but the home of someone whose portrait she'd been commissioned to paint.
3. She was an author as well as an artist and map maker. She wrote an autobiography, From Bedsitter to Household Name, published by her own company. She remained in charge of that business until she died at the age of 89 in 1996. She drove to work every day in a Red Mercedes. Her motto was "On we go".
4. In her book, she tells of how she spent 18 hours a day for a year walking 3,000 miles through the streets of London in order to compile her map. This has been questioned by sceptics who believe she wouldn't have needed to do that, since she would have had access to the maps her father produced and could have obtained street plans from local authorities - but that's a much less romantic story.
5. It was such a romantic story that someone made a musical out of it - The A-Z of Mrs P premièred in 2014. She is also commemorated with a tunnel boring machine named after her. Crossrail has two machines called Phyllis (after Pearsall) and Ada (after Ada Lovelace).
6. Publishers weren't interested in publishing her maps, so she formed her own company, the Geographers' Map Company in 1936. Then she had the challenge of getting shops to sell them. Eventually, WH Smith ordered 1250 copies. Pearsall said she delivered them herself in a wheelbarrow. They sold out - and other shops became interested. The map has been in continuous production ever since, and there are A-Zs covering other cities too.
7. If you had a first edition A to Z and wanted to get to Trafalgar Square, you might have been out of luck. The story goes that index cards with every street on them were kept in shoeboxes, one for each letter of the alphabet. Pearsall accidentally knocked the "T" box out of a window and didn't manage to find all the cards.
8. Talking of editions, another omission for a number of years was the date of publication, so it would have been easy for people to end up with an out of date one just as Pearsall did herself with Ordnance Survey. Collectors wishing to date an old edition they've found have to do a bit of detective work by looking at the name and address of the publisher since they know which years the company moved, and which year it changed its name. They will also know that no maps were produced during the second world war, because the Government ordered that street maps should be removed from sale, so the business was only producing war maps for newspapers at that time.
9. Early editions were in black and white but later on they were produced in colour. The colour scheme is the reason cab drivers refer to A and B roads as "Oranges and Lemons", since they use A to Z maps when completing the Knowledge.
10. If you're thinking of producing a map and reckon copying the A to Z is a good idea, beware. The company are out to get people who try to copy them. The London A to Z contains about 100 "trap streets", roads that either don't exist or are wrongly named. If another map is produced with those in it, they know it's a copy and will sue. Trap streets have found their way into popular fiction as places that do exist but are somehow magically hidden from the general population and populated by magical creatures. The A to Z itself was used as a plot device in an episode of Sherlock when a code was said to be hidden in a "book everyone owns". When the Bible and a dictionary failed to crack the code, Sherlock is inspired to try the A to Z when he goes outside and sees some tourists using one.