I find the Phillips road atlas pretty good, it comes sort of ring bound so you can easily tear pages out to take with you. I use this in combination with Google maps selecting the walking option for directions. I'll generally do myself a route sheet via Google, putting in an extra destination for each junction. I then put this in a spreadsheet and have the distance for each one plus an accumulative value. Works pretty well unless I type right instead of left, which I did once.
While riding I just have a little sheet with distances, type of junction, ie roundabout, T, crossroads, etc and road name or brief descriptor. I use my cycle computer and know roughly when the next change will be coming. For example, I may stay on a road for 8 miles, so I know I've got half an hour to daydream. If things go wrong then I've got the large scale map pages to refer to.
GPS is tempting but there's a lot of funtionality in it that I don't need and I really don't want another gadget to charge or find batteries for. I do like the idea of the large scale maps available online or via CDROM. Then you can sort your route, print it off and do a summary for easy reference.