NEW YORK, NY.- “Looking at a map is like looking into a fire in a fireplace; there’s a sense of something happening all the time, and it draws you in,” said Anders Mattsson, a cabinetmaker for Svenskt Tenn.

The Swedish design company is celebrating its centennial by participating in a surge of interest in maps. It is wrapping cabinets in copies of a Stockholm map printed in the 1870s that is teeming with pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages promenading past churchyards, windmills, farmlands and moored sailing ships. Who were those people, where were they headed and how often were those streetscapes reworked? The detailed scenery, Mattsson said, “allows your fantasy just to wander.”

The limited-edition cabinet is based on mid-20th-century works by Svenskt Tenn’s founder, Estrid Ericson, and her longtime collaborator, Austrian-born architect Josef Frank. The two designers used antique and modern maps of Stockholm, Manhattan, Paris, London and other locales to enliven furniture, textiles, dinnerware and wallcoverings. Cartographic patterns helped the team “cross borders and try new things,” Per Ahlden, Svenskt Tenn’s curator, said.

The company is following a trail blazed over centuries by cartographers and artisans worldwide who have created what are known as cartifacts: objects with map motifs, such as ashtrays, lampshades, board games, book bindings, quilts and rugs.

Maps also have been incorporated historically into ancient mosaic floors in the Middle East, calf skins at medieval cathedrals, folding screens in Japan, tapestries for British and Italian aristocrats, samplers stitched by early American schoolgirls, frescoes at the Vatican, murals at U.S. civic buildings, bamboo cheeseboards and linoleum flooring.

For many patrons, like artist Johannes Vermeer’s Dutch customers, displayed maps have signified “worldliness and influence and wealth and power,” said Kevin J. Brown, who owns Geographicus Rare Antique Maps in Brooklyn, New York.

In the digital age, physical maps had been widely expected to die out, since people could easily track their every move as dots on screens. Instead, interest has intensified.

“We are cartographically aware in a way that we haven’t been before,” said map dealer Daniel Crouch, whose inventory has included silk pincushions printed with maps and a tiny porcelain figurine of a map peddler.

And as scholar Mike Duggan points out in a new book, “All Mapped Out: How Maps Shape Us,” travelers still gather around analog maps on the walls of transit stations. The cartographic display, Duggan writes, “makes our plans visible to others as we trace a route across town, or audible as we discuss it with our fellow travelers or seek help from a stranger.”

Steven Feldman, a consultant in Britain, runs the website mappery.org, dedicated to sightings of “maps in the wild.” He posts improbable uses of cartographic imagery: etched onto wine decanters, for example, or echoed in the shapes of a human-made archipelago in Dubai. Antiques featured on mappery sometimes depict defunct empires, such as the Soviet Union.

Maps, Feldman said, “are a catalog of change.”

Cartographic décor can help sate fundamental human needs to feel oriented.

“Maps are inherently trusted; there’s something about them that makes people feel secure,” said PJ Mode, a map scholar and collector who is donating his holdings to Cornell University. His main focus is “persuasive cartography”: maps meant to sway public opinion, for instance by advocating abolition in the early 1800s, or women’s suffrage or warmongering in the 1910s. Mode likes to quote what Beryl Markham, a writer and aviator, imagined that maps wanted to say to their users: “follow me closely, doubt me not. ... Without me, you are alone and lost.”

Mappish furnishings can serve as conversation starters as well, with their seductively subtle layering, details and textures. They represent real places, yet “they’re a little bit puzzling,” said Susan M. Schulten, a professor at the University of Denver whose books include “Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America.”

Institutions are now immersing visitors in cartography. At the Newark Museum’s Ballantine House in New Jersey, a city map from 1889 sprawls across a gallery floor. The Center for Brooklyn History has slathered walls in centuries of neighborhood maps. At the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, a 60-foot-long world map points out vanished and extant cultural landmarks, including a Yiddish bookstore in South Africa and a Yiddish theater in Uzbekistan.

The imagery can resonate with the human body, the networks of neurons and blood circulation systems.

“It’s all about connections,” said Adrienne Ottenberg, an artist in New York who incorporates maps into her work. The Museum at Eldridge Street in Manhattan has installed dozens of her printed fabric banners, portraying change-making local heroines against backdrops of neighborhood maps.

At Stanford University, a stairwell is lined in towering reproductions of antique maps, including overviews of the cosmos and a snippet of Manhattan grid. The staircase leads to most of the 200,000 maps collected by entrepreneur and philanthropist David Rumsey. Climbing the steps for a visit to the David Rumsey Map Center “sets you up in the mindset of expansion and immersion,” Rumsey said. In the 1980s, when he started collecting, “people didn’t think old maps could be anything but out of date.” In his own library, he juxtaposes two 18th-century views of the streets of Rome: “It just excites my brain. I love to go from one to the other, back and forth.”

Among the most common entry points to cartophilia are representations of where the collectors have set foot in real life. For New Yorkers willing to spend, say, about $280,000 on a 1770s map of the city, they can study how “Brookland Parish” has lost all traces of its pastoral roots yet maintained colonial-era place names like Red Hook and Flatbush.

“There’s so much that’s recognizable, yet there’s so much that’s different, it just sucks you in,” said Matthew Edney, a professor of geography specializing in the history of cartography at the University of Southern Maine, affiliated with the university’s Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education. He added that at times, “the past is a foreign country.”

J.C. McElveen, a retired lawyer in Maryland who owns about 1,400 maps dating back to the 16th century, said that one of his treasures is only a few years old. His wife, Mary, made him a personalized map out of modern maps, showing where they have lived and traveled for decades.

“You look at those,” he said, “and memories are triggered.”

Tania Rossetto, a professor of cultural geography at the University of Padua in Italy, keeps a contemporary map of Italy on her children’s bedroom wall. It serves, she said, as “a meeting place where our fingers trace memories and dreams of family trips made, and to be made.”

Dennis M. Gurtz, a financial planner in suburban Maryland who owns about 1,000 maps dating to the 1590s, warns that collections can start deceptively small. But then, after perhaps three purchases, the “old-map pox” kicks in and the shopping sprees begin. “Be very careful,” he said.

Severe cartophilia is diagnosable when wall space runs out and the buyers start squirreling away maps in storage. That moment is “a vital inflection point,” said Michael Buehler, the founder of Boston Rare Maps.

Svenskt Tenn’s new cabinet, sheathed in the 1870s map of Stockholm, pays homage to the wanderlust of the company’s leaders. Ericson and her husband, Sigfrid, a sea captain, globe-trotted for design inspiration while bringing home souvenirs, including antique maps. Frank and his Finnish-born wife, Anna, settled in Sweden after escaping Nazi persecution in Vienna and also spent years in New York.

Ahlden, Svenskt Tenn’s curator, said Ericson liked to paraphrase a quote from Saint Augustine: “The world is a book, and those who stay home are reading only one page.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.