I’LL never forget my first globe. It was a basketball-size sphere with textured mountains and shining cerulean seas, but its crowning inner glory was a light bulb. Suspended in the darkness of my bedroom for most of the nights of my childhood, it served first as a night light unto my world. But night after night and year after year, it showed me the makings of things like nights and years and a permanently marvelous truth: We live on a sphere, turning in the light of a star.

I plotted many things on that globe, including my career as a pilot. I have two globes today (a light-up model and a mind-wringing Japanese jigsaw sphere). But while stylized images of globes still appear occasionally on Web sites, newscasts and logos, actual globes are increasingly rare. When did you last see a globe in an office, or a living room? American schools, too, have seen a decline. Officials for major school systems — including Chicago and Seattle — report that most classrooms no longer have them. The last globe you saw was probably in a child’s bedroom — a high-minded toy.

Not that they haven’t had a good run. The first globes were “celestial” models of the heavens — what Atlas shoulders (it’s the sky, after all, that seems round). The first “terrestrial” globe was made around 150 B.C. (by Crates of Mallus, in case you’re ever in a barroom brawl over what the Stoic grammarians ever did for us). The oldest Earth globe that survives today is from 1492. It was spectacularly ill timed, though a colorful cast of saints, mermen and Sciapods make up for the absent Americas.

Just across the Columbian divide is the Hunt-Lenox globe, circa 1510, which features portions of the Americas, and the weighty term “New World.” The globe also bears cartography’s only known deployment of “here be dragons” (in Southeast Asia). Elizabethans, in particular, loved globes — “the whole earth, a present for a prince,” was Queen Elizabeth’s awe-struck response to a gift of a globe — and then there is the name of a certain theater. In “The Comedy of Errors,” Dromio rudely maps the portly kitchen wench: England on the chin, France on the forehead, and just you guess about the Netherlands.