I'd wager, if you are of a certain age, you have memories of fighting with one of these dang things while trying to figure out where you are, where you need to be, and just how lost you really are. These days we all carry interconnected super computers in our pockets and take for granted that they know our location to within a handful of yards (or meters if you aren't in the US), but when I was younger, and especially when I was a kid, these were the closest thing we had to navigation aids.
And damnit the post-apocalypse was better for it!
Yes, the post-apocalypse. Back when I first started wandering the wastelands during my after-school hours the very idea of GPS and computer navigation was science fiction. The kind of science fiction that didn't belong in a good old fashioned post-apocalyptic wasteland! The idea of wandering the wastes with a tattered a stained fragment of an old paper map felt right at the time, and for me it still feels right. It has a low-tech tactile aspect that works in a ruined world where "treasure" was usually represented by physical goods and items, and where knowledge that wasn't part of a skill was often lost. The kind of wasteland where a waster stained encyclopedia was a tradable item.
While cleaning my basement I found these three atlases, and was about to drop them in the recycle bin, after all, my phone does everything these do, but better. And then I got an idea. I'm prepping to run some post apocalyptic something later this year and ... why couldn't I use these for maps? I could tear the pages out, stain them with coffee or tea, mark them up with pen and marker, and then either hand them to players or take a picture for those internet games that most of us have found so much more convenient.
Also, it was super timely as I didn't have a good topic for today. Ha!