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Allen Carroll, the chief cartographer at National Geographic, tells me that he’s not worried about the market, because printed maps and Internet maps fulfill different functions. “So far, we haven’t found that our atlas sales have been hurt by the Internet. Very different than is the case, obviously, with encyclopedias.” Encyclopedia publishers like Britannica were caught unawares by the rise of CD-ROM encyclopedias in the 1990s, and their sales collapsed by 83 percent in just five years. Atlases may hold out longer, because no digital platform has yet managed to deliver browsable maps, in all their detail and versatility, as well as paper can. But what happens when that platform arrives, as it inevitably will? Could one killer iPad app doom atlases forever?

I may be part of the last generation to harbor a peculiar nostalgia for paper maps that stubbornly refuse to zoom or scroll or layer—in fact, that stubbornly refuse even to refold themselves into the neat rectangle you found in the glove compartment. That’s what it is: nostalgia. Paper maps remind me of school libraries and the backseat of the family car on vacation. Pleasant times.

The name on nearly all those maps was “Rand McNally,” America’s best-known and best-selling map publisher for most of the last century. Founded in Chicago in 1868, the partnership between a Boston printer and a poor Irish immigrant soon branched out into the budding transportation industry, producing railroad tickets, guides, and timetables. The company was very nearly destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871, but quick-thinking cofounder William Rand saved the day, rescuing two ticket-printing machines from the flames and burying them in the cool sand at a Lake Michigan beach three miles north of the city, where they’d be safe from the 3,000-degree inferno. Just three days later, before a survey had even been completed of the still-smoldering city, the buried machines were up and running in a rented building that had survived the flames. The very next year, Rand McNally printed its first map, a railway map of the United States and Canada, and the rest is history.

When I asked a Rand McNally publicist if I could stop by for a visit, I hoped its headquarters would retain some of the musty mid-century charm I associate with its maps—would cavernous brick vaults full of whirring printing presses be too much to ask? Instead my cab pulls up to an anonymous office park in suburban Skokie. I don’t even see the iconic Rand McNally logo—a compass superimposed on an elliptical globe—until I’m in the lobby trying to figure out which floor reception is on.

“We finally moved out of the old place four months ago,” explains Jane Szczepaniak, the assistant who arranged my visit. The company’s two hundred employees don’t seem to miss the windowless painted cinder-block walls and faded green filing cabinets of their longtime home. “It felt like an elementary school,” Jane jokes. In the move, fifty years of old map film were tossed, and employees were invited to pillage a disorganized, dimly lit room full of thousands of past Rand McNally maps. Once everyone had a few souvenirs, the rest were thrown away.

Joel Minster, a former civil engineer, has been chief cartographer at Rand McNally for the past nine years. His office looks decidedly modern, with blue Earth hemispheres protruding from the walls as if they’d been beamed there by a Star Trek transporter, but he’s adamant that old-fashioned paper maps are still Rand McNally’s focus—for the moment. When I ask about the maps on the Rand McNally website, which still scroll and zoom chunkily in fixed increments, like MapQuest in 1999, he smiles wryly. “We’re giving those away for free, so it’s not really our goal to be number one.” But even though road atlases sold to truckers and vacationers still pay the bills, he says that the company will keep a presence in GPS devices and e-reader atlases and smart-phone apps—not necessarily because it thinks those are the future but to have