
Explore 44 different cities with our collection of MapGuides. Each MapGuide consists of six easy-to-use fold-out maps plus great listings for all tastes and budgets.
MapGuides: An Origin Story
Once upon a time there was a brilliant bookbinder, Rodolfo Zanardi, who would always be fiddling with small pieces of paper—folding, unfolding, refolding—trying to work out how he might get a big image to fit in a little book, until one day the idea came to him. Sewing wasn’t an option, but what about gluing together folded pieces of paper to make a bigger page?
His company and that of his long-term partners Editoriale, printers in Trieste, and Gallimard, publishers in Paris, were already working on a series of travel guides. The unfolded page being twice as big as the standard one, it was ideal to accommodate a large-scale map. Special machines had to be built but it wasn’t long before the now patented ‘octavius’ project was born.
Today the MapGuides, as they are called in the UK and US, are published in 15 languages and have sold over 5.5 million copies worldwide.

(from
Everyman Mapguides)