The story of Roads of Texas and Shearer Publishing

[Tim Vasquez]

Remember Roads of Texas? After posting the 1992 Stormtrack retrospective I decided to check around and see whatever happened to Shearer Publishing of Fredericksburg TX, makers of our beloved Roads of Texas. Here's where all those road atlases came from (aerial photo thanks to Bing Maps):

Bill Shearer, founder of Shearer Publishing, got his start in publishing at Texas A&M Press in the mid-1970s while an agricultural economics student. He started the business in 1981 with his wife Kathy, hoping to bring national prestige to regional authors with talent. It was run inside the former Pat's Hall, a controversial 1940s beer hall. The company started publishing a small line of various books and in 1984 became a subsidiary of Houston-based Hart Graphics. Due to declining profits in their literary works catalogue, they decided to take on the "Roads of Texas" project. Most of the cartography work was provided by Texas Transportation Department county-level maps, leaving Shearer to colorize them, refine them, and add interesting content. The project proved to be a success. The layout was said to be done by "Texas A&M cartographers", though I've not really been able to figure out exactly whether this meant they hired alumni, sourced work to Texas A&M, or hired students to do the work.

Bill passed away in 1996 from a brain tumor at the age of 45, leaving Kathy (then 44) to run both Shearer Publishing and Book Marketing Plus. The success of the atlases did not go unnoticed, though, and they were already facing stiff competition from DeLorme, a large GIS data broker that used automated production methods to print its map series. By the late 1990s, DeLorme covered all of the US, while Shearer, without this advantage, only would cover about 7 states.

The parent company Hart Graphics dissolved in 2001 without finding a buyer, leaving Shearer once again independent. In 2005 the "Roads Of" product line was sold off to Mapsco and Universal/Kappa Map, and what was left focused exclusively on Texan culture. What happened in 2011 gets a little fuzzy. The Shearer publication website now redirects to domain name parking, though website content is still there, which suggests that perhaps the webhosting account is delinquent and suggests issues with finances or staffing. I am not able to tell what goes on at the Shearer building but it may be a warehouse for the Book Marketing Plus operation, which is listed with a residential Houston address. In any case it looks like very little is going on at the building.

The Roads of XYZ maps are still around, though with much different branding. I'm not sure whether they're still profitable, as the Amazon sales ranking looks to be lower than many of my own meteorology book titles. Regardless, these atlases are still extremely useful for traveling the back roads and presumably will still be in a lot of chase vehicles for the next 10 or 20 years, even if only as well-worn copies.

Tim