Errors on oil company road maps

This is the strongest candidate for a deliberate mistake that I know of on a European road map. It comes from the 1961 reprint of Shell's "Taking the car" map of Europe, and although printed by Rotopress of Stuttgart, draws on original cartography by Mairs. A motorway bypass is quite clearly shown on the A11 road between Thetford and Norwich, roughly where the Wymondham bypass is today. But this road has never been a motorway, and the Wymondham bypass was only built in the 1990s, over 30 years later. This bypass was not shown on the 1959 or 1964 printings.

Another candidate for a deliberate error comes from the 1962 Europa Strassen Führer touring guide from the Esso Touring Service in Germany. This booklet of strip maps, which was also available in English and other languages, used local spellings of placenames throughout, so that the maps were identical in the English and German editions. Except... Torquay in Devon is rendered as "Torquai" in the German, but not the British, printing. As far as I can tell, the Germans do not have their own name for the town, so I suspect that this is a small yet deliberate error.

The Southern end of Route 5C (Carlisle-Plymouth), also shows how the coastline was distorted to give a perspective view.

Possibly the most fundamental error is to print the wrong cover onto a map!

This happened to Gasolin around 1960; its section 5 map of Baden-Württemburg, Schwarzwald-Bodensee has a second cover pasted on top of the one originally printed. The cover printed first has the same (correct) section number but a different image and the title Hessen, Rhein-Main-Gebiet, Franken - which should have been section 3, according to the planning map on the rear. (Strangely the 1961 edition also got this wrong; the Hessen, etc. map was numbered 4 on the cover, but 3 on the planning map on the reverse.)

Geocart appeared to have made an even more fundamental error in this 1987 map. Although the cover states that it contains a Texaco map of the Benelux countries, the map pasted inside is Geocart's map of France, including a 47 page index to French place names. Texaco do not sell petrol in France, and it is not known if the Belgian or Dutch Texaco subsidiaries would have commissioned a map of France (although two of their main rivals, Shell and Esso, have done so).

An equally annoying production error found its way into the 1986 Belgian Shell street atlas "Le livre des 50000 rues". This intended to include street plans for 83 towns across Belgian, spread over 86 double pages of maps. However, my copy has atlas pages 8-22 omitted completely, but 23-42 bound into the atlas twice. This means that maps for Antwerp, Arlon, Ath, Bastogne, Berchem, Brasschaat, Bruges and much of Brussels are missing, although included in the street index. As far as I can tell, this copy slipped through the quality control at Falkplan-Suurland and was sold for 195 BFr by a Shell filling station.

From 1954 until the early 1960s, Shell issued a series of 11 sectional maps under the title "Wegweiser". Section 6, Rhein-Mosel, showed a slightly hackneyed scene of grape pickers on a hillside above the Rhine, with Burg Katz (and the Lorelei) behind them. However, for the first edition in 1954 (far left), the image was reversed, possibly to improve the compositional layout; from 1956 onwards (near left) it was printed correctly.

It can be a real problem for cartographers when they are required to draw detailed maps of countries far from their base. The map (left) of Poole, England is reasonably accurate and is used in the 2003 AS24 Guide to locate their station. But Fleets Bridge Roundabout is actually NW of the AS24 location, not due East, and a local would not have chosen to mark the small station at Parkstone in preference to the main station in Poole town centre.

This guide does contain one clear mistake; in the 8 page Atlas Europe at the back prepared by Gabelli, one page (only) omits all place names unless they have AS24 sites. So whilst the area around Hamburg names the main city, albeit in French (top right), Berlin is accidentally left off the map completely (lower right).

Forty years earlier, another French cartographer had made what was almost certainly a deliberate mistake, by naming the village of Bere Regis, around 10 miles W of Poole "Bere-Régis" with an acute accent on the second e. This was on a BP Atlas of France, prepared by IGN & Photolith (and is illustrated on one of the Quiz Pages).

There are a number of small errors in place names on this 2007 Tesco Road Atlas (right). This isn't a British Tesco map, but one from their Hungarian subsidiary, using local cartography from Cartographia (who are normally a reliable firm). Among the spelling errors, Sheerness is "Sheernees", Fraserburgh is "Fraseburgh" and the hamlet of Summercourt on the A30 in Cornwall is "Sommercourt" (although the nearby road junction of Indian Queens would have been a better place to mark). In Holland, Hilvarenbeek misses its "L".