There’s a universal theme to paper road maps, especially for baby boomers traveling after retirement, said Kevin Nursick, spokesman for Connecticut’s transportation department. Paper maps, he said, offer an experience that dead batteries and unreliable service connections cannot.

“Simpler times are something everyone yearns for. And maybe looking at a map takes you back,” he said. “The technology is neat, but on a personal level, there’s a sense of nostalgia when you look at the paper map. A lot of people are yearning for simpler times.”

At the collectors’ association exposition, a carpeted ballroom at an Embassy Suites hotel outside Columbus featured old road maps for sale, and gave collectors a glimpse into an era of romanticized advertising – brightly colored paper maps promising the sunny beaches of Florida, the mountains of Montana and Chicago’s famous skyline.

Free roadside maps boomed between the 1920s and 1970s, when oil companies worked with a handful of publishers. As major highways were being built, those maps became synonymous with the possibilities of the open road.

Dick Bloom, a founding member of the group, has been collecting maps since he was 10. The retired airline pilot from Danville, Ky., said there used to be an element of surprise in road trips.

“The paper map was all you had back then,” Bloom, 74, said from his merchandise table. “It was the only way to get around. It was a lot more of an adventure back then. Life was much more of an adventure.”

Transportation agencies aren’t the only ones printing paper road maps. Companies like AAA and Rand McNally have been in the business for decades and are just as synonymous with trip planning.

Members of AAA, whose services are fully integrated online and include a TripTik mobile app, requested more than 14 million paper guides in 2010, spokeswoman Heather Hunter said. The number of paper maps AAA prints has declined, but she wouldn’t go into detail.

Rand McNally is known for its road atlases but also offers an interactive travel website and GPS devices; it declined to comment on how many maps it’s printing these days.

Carrier, now a consultant in the mapping and travel publishing industry, said the additional services from traditional mapping companies show the incredible potential in the industry.

“There’s no question in the U.S. that traditional road maps are diminished,” he said. “But there are other areas of the map industry that are thriving and even growing.”

Charlie Regan, who runs the maps division for National Geographic, said the company has sold more paper map products in the past three years than it has ever sold since launching the division in 1915. He attributed it to customers learning to appreciate good map data – and also noted that sales of international maps have remained consistent, and that sales of recreational hiking maps are on the rise.

“It’s almost like a golden age in mapping. More people than ever before in history are using maps every day,” he said. “For me, that’s fantastic, and it’s an opportunity.”

What most people agree on is that paper road maps will not go away quietly, like pay phones and phone books. Chris Turner, a collector from Jeffersonville, Ind., shook his head at the notion of paper maps becoming obsolete.

“With a GPS or other mapping system that you might use, you feel like you’re beholden to the GPS lady. You know? ‘Turn left here. Recalculating.’ Well, with a map, you can trace your route and you can decide for yourself still where you want to go.

“And if you want to vary from the GPS lady, so be it,” he said. “But you’re armed with that knowledge from that map to do that.”