It seems I'm the first owner of this edition to post information about it here on LibraryThing. The distinguishing features of this atlas as opposed to others published by U.S. companies is that it is not state-focused. Rather, it breaks the country into strips and eliminates state barriers. Thus, there's less flipping back-and-forth between, for example, Washington and Oregon, to determine how long a trip should take.

The atlas features an enhanced set of Northeast Corridor pages with greater detail. The 2008 edition seemed to be up-to-date based on my own experience with a stretch of new highway in Pennsylvania long under construction being included. At the same time, however, a major metropolitan area in Pennsylvania, the Lehigh Valley, normally considered to consist of Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton, and a tip of Phillipsburg, NJ, was truncated at Bethlehem.

In terms of errors, the map of Huntington, WV, (p. 221) would seem to indicate that it's in Kentucky based on the dotted-line border between Ohio and the state on the other side of the river. The title of the map is correct, but the name of the state facing Ohio is not.

This is probably the second-to-last really good edition of a paper-based road atlas for North America. Mapquest and other online mapping products have made door-to-door routing simple, and with GPS units dropping to under $200 or being included in cars as standard features, atlases will become the new wristwatch.

Coverage of Canada is good enough, but coverage of Mexico is two spreads (four total pages) and Puerto Rico is included on one of the four pages. Detail could be improved in for a country with more than 100 million people immediately to the south of the United States. ( )

8th edition ( )

BIYJF