Mapsco

Mapsco was a privately held publisher of maps and atlases, and was based in Addison, Texas. Universal Map Group, LLC, an affiliate of Kappa Media Group, Inc. acquired the assets of Mapsco, Inc. from Dallas-based Rupe Investment Corp. in March 2010. Rupe Investment Corp. had owned Mapsco, Inc. since 1989.

Mapsco was started by Milton Boyd Keith, owner of several Dallas, Texas, florist shops. Impetus for the first Dallas Mapsco began in 1948 when Keith's drivers kept getting lost, and he decided to make a street atlas booklet for them. Keith spent four years appealing to local government entities to obtain current mapping, but was never successful. Finally, in 1951, Keith approached the Dallas City Building Inspection Division, to obtain mapping data. Their maps were the most accurate produced at that time, but had no index. (The building inspectors at that time just knew where everything was by memory.) Keith obtained the BID maps from the city and began to work in the back of the flower shop at 3323 Oak Lawn Avenue, producing an indexed street map. His shop manager, Lily Kendrick, was instrumental in the laborious process of paging and indexing the city of Dallas into a booklet.

The first Mapsco Product, the Dallas Street Guide, was printed in 1952, with 3,000 copies produced. The original book covered Dallas and the Park Cities, with insets for Carrollton and Garland, Texas. The book was originally not intended for public sale, and was only to be used by Keith's large fleet of flower delivery drivers. Soon, however, other flower shops began asking Keith and his employees for copies of the books to aid them in their deliveries as well.

From 1953 to 1955, the Dallas Mapsco was made with a glued back in order to save costs on production. These first few years also saw the production of Mapsco's first product outside of Dallas, and it was not Fort Worth, but much more distant Houston, where Mapsco again became the first company to make an indexed city street atlas. Unfortunately, the endeavor ended poorly when the glued backs disintegrated in the very humid air of that city, and Mapsco has not produced a Houston map since.

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