“Route 66 Yellow Pages” off to a good start

When I first heard last summer about a Kansas firm wanting to publish a 300-page, advertising-supported Route 66 guidebook in early 2010, I was skeptical.

Such a publication would be a huge undertaking. Trying to collect advertising from businesses along a 2,400-mile stretch of old highway would be like herding cats. And the ambitions were lofty, especially with a tight deadline. I had little doubt the publishers would eventually panic and think: “What have we got ourselves into?”

Well, the publication was introduced at the Route 66 Festival in Quapaw, Okla., last month. “Keeping You on the Mother Road” (224 pages, soft cover, $19.66) wasn’t published by the early part of the year, nor is it 300 pages. And even though the  “Route 66 Yellow Pages” (as roadies are calling it) contains flaws, it should be commended for a good start.

Having spent a weekend with the guide, I’ll list its good points first:

• It contains a multitude of articles, photos and other material from longtime roadies, including Kip Welborn, Dave Clark, John & Lenore Weiss, Joe Sonderman, Jane Dippel, Laurel Kane and others. Jim Conkle also wrote the introduction. So the guide was smart enough to enlist Route 66 enthusiasts.
• It’s chock-full of useful information, including lists of museums, municipalities, tourism bureaus, Route 66 associations, libraries, post offices, ambulance services, campgrounds, events, radio stations, and parks.
• It includes Yellow Pages for select cities or regions. Such listings range from restaurants to bookstores to auto repair shops.
• The Route 66 maps seem well-researched and detailed, and include many obscure alignments (the missing one I noticed was a tiny one near Arcadia, Okla.).
• The pages come in full color throughout, especially the attractive, professional-looking advertisements that almost certainly pleased many Route 66 businesses.

Here are “Keeping You on the Mother Road’s” shortcomings:

• The front cover claims “turn-by-turn directions with detailed maps.” The publication indeed contains maps, but no turn-by-turn directions. One of the representatives responded that the maps guide you turn-by-turn. To me, the claim conveys turn-by-turn directions in text. Perhaps this is an argument over semantics, but I would lose the “turn-by-turn directions” claim for fear of confusing or misleading readers.
• The maps are so colorful and detailed, it’s hard to read the text for the road and street names. Blurring some of the detail might help it be more readable, especially for older readers.
• The Yellow Pages seem a bit scattershot. For instance, it includes listings for the northeastern Oklahoma area of Miami, Grove, Commerce, Vinita and Quapaw, but none for the major metro area of Tulsa.
• Chicago to Oklahoma City covers the guide’s first 160 pages, leaving a mere 64 for the remaining 1,300 miles of Route 66. Ads became obviously sparse after OKC. An effort to boost ad sales in Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Kingman, and the Los Angeles area would help boost the guide well past its original goal of 300 pages and give it more credibility.
• Parts of the guide are rife with errors in capitalization, punctuation and spelling. It’s embarrassing to see one of the contributors listed as “story editior” in the masthead. A once-over by a copy editor could rectify many of these goofs.

These deficiencies seem surmountable. And now that the publishers have a real guidebook that potential advertisers can see and feel with their own hands, it should be easier to boost revenues for the 2011 edition. Even with its flaws, “Keeping You on the Mother Road” proves to be a fairly impressive guidebook.

If you’re interested in buying the guide, send an e-mail to motherroadinc(at)yahoo(dot)com. It also can be ordered from the Legends of America site here.