The geographers' a-z street atlas is one of the icons of london, as famous as red buses and . it is the book people reach for when they want to know exactly where to find thousands of streets in london. you could find it on the bookshelves of the most london homes and in just every travel agency in the city. it lists every street in london and its carefully drawn maps show parks, gardens, railway lines, canals and just about anything else that can be put onto a piece of paper. so where did it come from? phyllis pearsall was a remarkable woman. she was born in britain in 1906. she stayed there until she left school, and then travelled around france. she earned money by painting people's pictures and writing for a newspaper in paris. in the 1930s she returned to london, where she worked for her father's company, making maps of the world. she thought that there was a need for new street maps of london, after in 1935 she got lost while using a 20-year-old street map. so she started working on a book of maps. she walked along every street in the capital and wrote down the name, the important buildings and even the house numbers. working eighteen-hour days she walked a total of 3,000 miles, while compiling her book. she kept the information about the streets on cards in small boxes. one day a box with cards of all the streets beginning with "t" fell out of her window. she found most of the cards, but some cards landed on top of a bus and she never saw them again. when she sent the cards to the printer, someone asked her, "why isn't trafalgar square in your book? " it was because she had lost the card. phyllis pearsall called her book a to z. the first a to z was in the shops in 1936 and sold very well. now it is the most popular book of london street maps. it shows every street in london, important buildings, museums, theatres, schools, parks, train and underground stations. later phyllis pearsall painted pictures of many of the city's famous buildings. in the same year, she formed the geographers' map company which began publishing street maps and atlases of towns and cities and road maps of the whole country. today there are more than 130 people working for the company. it publishes 359 titles including maps and atlases in both black and white and full colour. computers were introduced into the drawing process in 1991. in 1996 the company produced its first electronic street map of london on cd which contained over 90,000 streets, stations and different places of interest. 2005 saw the start of the next generation of a-z maps, this time for mobile phones. phyllis pearsall wrote about the history of the company in her book from bedsitter to household name. she died in august 1996 at the age of 89. дайте перевод, но только не с переводчиков разных. заранее )

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