ESSO

For the first time Yugoslavia was welcoming tourists, so it was added onto an expanded Austria map. The Innsbruck map is a special for the 1964 Winter Olympics and is allowed one small drawing on the cover as well! Only the Main Europe map lacked an outline of the continent, opting for a rather plain design with a description in eight languages. This map was designed by Germany's Karl Thiemig to a scale of 1:3,500,000, but printed in Great Britain.

Although they conformed to the standard design, both the 1965 Greece and 1967 Spain & Portugal maps were prepared in London by George Philip, who had replaced Thiemig as Esso's preferred cartographer. Some countries, where Esso had a greater presence, also sold sectional maps, such as the 1972 Sudjylland & Fyn map from Denmark, using Geodætisk Institut's designs and printed by Møller & Landschultz.

British and Irish maps were the only ones with consistently non-standard cover designs. Three series of photographic maps (using two sets of images) took Esso from 1962 to 1968; from 1969-71 they moved to blue sketches of landmark buildings, such as Abinger Hammer in Surrey. In Germany, a mid 1960s series of regional maps, backed by Panorama maps, were allowed a touch of colour to creep onto the cover - almost suggesting that the Ruhr might be a holiday destination!

Unlike Shell with its cartoguides, Esso did not regularly produce regional maps of France. However at the start of the era of plain cover maps, it distributed the two issues shown here. The Paris map is a continuation of the title from the 1950s, but the South East map appears to be a new and short-lived sectional map. It is not known if it was one of a set of four regional maps using the common scale of 1:500,000, or whether it was a unique title produced to cover the popular holiday areas of the Mediterranean coast and Alps.

Paris and Southeast France map images courtesy Richard Horwitz

For the 1964 season Esso published the small format (160x110mm) leaflet shown here called La Dordogne touristique, and this is likely to be one of a series covering main tourist areas. It opened out to reveal a rudimentary map above descriptions of the sights in the three main towns; the reverse contained description of the five suggested tours marked on the map. Compagnie Française d'Études et de Réalisations produced the leaflet for Esso.

Esso France also produced a distinct oddity in the mid 1960s: a series of around a dozen EPs titled "La Route Joyeuse". Each one consisted of a thin vinyl record to be played at 33rpm with three folk songs from the region shown on the map extract on the rear cover. Number 8, shown here, was from Bretagne/Maine-Anjou, and the tracks included the Breton War zu an heol performed by the ensemble "Kevrenn".