Three years ago Ian Allan published an atlas combining a re-drawn and enlarged reprint of Philip Conolly's Pre-Grouping Atlas and Gazetteer of 1958 and a reprint of the Ian Allan reprint of the Railway Clearing House Junction Diagrams. I think it was a superb idea to bring these two works together into a single volume, but every time I turn to it I find myself intensely irritated by the chosen layout, and I wonder if this is just me or whether anyone else feels the same.
The pages of the junction diagrams are scattered amongst the pages of the maps by double-page spread and don't seem necessarily to tie in in any way with the adjacent map pages. I find that this makes it very unintuitive -- it's almost invariably necessary to use the index to find a diagrams page. I can't help feeling that it would have made using the book much easier if all the pages of the atlas had been printed first, then all the pages of the diagrams. Or if a slightly more lavish publication were possible, to use an LH/RH form, with the map pages all on left-hand pages and on the accompanying right-hand page any relevant diagrams extract from the full-page sheets of diagrams, so that map and diagram of, say, Manchester were facing each other.
Am I just being awkward?
The pages of the junction diagrams are scattered amongst the pages of the maps by double-page spread and don't seem necessarily to tie in in any way with the adjacent map pages. I find that this makes it very unintuitive -- it's almost invariably necessary to use the index to find a diagrams page. I can't help feeling that it would have made using the book much easier if all the pages of the atlas had been printed first, then all the pages of the diagrams. Or if a slightly more lavish publication were possible, to use an LH/RH form, with the map pages all on left-hand pages and on the accompanying right-hand page any relevant diagrams extract from the full-page sheets of diagrams, so that map and diagram of, say, Manchester were facing each other.
Am I just being awkward?