Some drift
Year ago in the precommercial pre WWW era of the internet my brother read on rec.backcountry that if a private individual ordered $500 worth of USGS maps they were considered a dealer and got them for 50% off. I was early in my hiking career so he and I made up wish list and bought over $500 of maps. This was in the late eighties when many of the rural USGS (like the 4 pack area up along the border in Maine) maps were still 1921 15 minute quads. The USGS was all on paper so in order to order maps you had to get two directories. One was an index to published maps and the other was the names of all the 7.5 minute quads even if they didnt exist yet. So the method was look up the quads you wanted then check to see if they were published then entered the numerical order code on the order form. After the first go around I decided I wanted more and my brother also did so we decided to see if we had enough for another order. We did and since this was the most likely the last time, I went through the naming directory and looked up maps that didnt technically exist in 7.5 format. The actual order codes not listed in the other directory were just a standard format so I decided which ones I wanted of maps that were not listed as published, filled in the codes and ordered then. About a month later I got my maps and every one of the maps that were officially not published were in the mailing tube. I ended up with 7.5 minute provisional quads for a lot of the 100 highest. It took several years before the map dealer got them. I got a lot of use out of them them and built a 4 drawer map case sized to the maps with ball bearing drawer slides to hold them. Yes I bought one of the earliest Map CDs of USGS maps but unlike the paper version they did not fit in my pocket. It turned out that the James River papermill in Gorham was a big supplier of the acid free paper used to print the maps so in theory some of the maps were made on paper made locally where I worked. Gorham also was a supplier of the paper for White Mountain Guides.
Another story for maps folks is that a congressmen could request USGS maps for free to fulfill constituent requests. I have run into a couple of folks who had extensive USGS maps collections for a particular state because some relative knew a congressman. My former scout leader had most of Maine obtained that way that he inherited by some relative. I always wonder if the set of USGS maps of NH that Gene Daniell brought with him for his 2 years in federal prison had been obtained that way.
