Free: National Geographic Lets You Download Thousands of Maps from the United States Geological Survey

Briefly not­ed: Nation­al Geo­graph­ic has built a web inter­face that allows any­one to find any quad in the Unit­ed States, and then down­load and print it. Dur­ing past decades, these quads (topo­graph­ic maps) were print­ed by the Unit­ed States Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS) on giant bus-sized press­es. But now they’ve been pre-processed to print on stan­dard print­ers found in most homes.

To access the maps, click here, pick a loca­tion, then start zoom­ing in until you see red icons. Then choose the geo­graph­i­cal­ly-appro­pri­ate icon and print/download a map in PDF for­mat.

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via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Now Free Online

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use