Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders

Joshua Foer; Dylan Thuras; Ella Morton

ISBN 10: 0761169083 / ISBN 13: 9780761169086

Published by Workman Publishing Company, 2016

About this Item

Brand new Later Print boldly signed by Joshua Foer on the title page without inscription using a black marker. "Atlas Obscura is a joyful antidote to the creeping suspicion that travel these days is little more than a homogenized corporate shopping opportunity. Here are hundreds of surprising, perplexing, mind-blowing, inspiring reasons to travel a day longer and farther off the path.Bestest travel guide ever." -- Mary Roach, author of Stiff. (Note: Photos may show magnified dust, a flash reflection, or color washout.) Paypal always welcome. We pack all our books with care and ship in cardboard boxes or priority envelopes secured with cardboard. Additional photos emailed upon request. This is a heavy, oversize book so shipping outside of the United States will be $50 Priority Mail. Seller Inventory # 11-28-18-4

Bibliographic Details

Title: Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the ...

Publisher: Workman Publishing Company

Publication Date: 2016

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: New

Dust Jacket Condition: New

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis:

It's time to get off the beaten path. Inspiring equal parts wonder and wanderlust, Atlas Obscura celebrates over 700 of the strangest and most curious places in the world. Talk about a bucket list: here are natural wonders the dazzling glowworm caves in New Zealand, or a baobob tree in South Africa that's so large it has a pub inside where 15 people can drink comfortably. Architectural marvels, including the M.C. Escher-like stepwells in India. Mind-boggling events, like the Baby Jumping Festival in Spain, where men dressed as devils literally vault over rows of squirming infants. Not to mention the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia, Turkmenistan's 40-year hole of fire called the Gates of Hell, a graveyard for decommissioned ships on the coast of Bangladesh, eccentric bone museums in Italy, or a weather-forecasting invention that was powered by leeches, still on display in Devon, England. Created by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton, ATLAS OBSCURA revels in the weird, the unexpected, the overlooked, the hidden and the mysterious. Every page expands our sense of how strange and marvelous the world really is. And with its compelling descriptions, hundreds of photographs, surprising charts, maps for every region of the world, it is a book to enter anywhere, and will be as appealing to the armchair traveller as the die-hard adventurer. Anyone can be a tourist. ATLAS OBSCURA is for the explorer.

Review:

I thought I had seen most of the interesting bits of the world. Atlas Obscura showed me that I was wrong. It's the kind of book that makes you want to pack in your workaday life and head out to places you'd never have dreamed of going, to see things you could not even have imagined. A joy to read and to reread. --Neil Gaiman

Your peregrine falcon needs a small talon trim? Go straight to the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital. . . . Be grateful when visiting the Karni Mata Rat Temple if one of the 20,000 venerated rodents runs across your bare foot it is considered good luck. . . . You won t be able to enter the 20-years-in-the-making and still abandoned tallest hotel in the world. It does not matter. Wherever you look around Pyongyang, North Korea, the 105-story skyscraper silently towers over all. . . . Life is short. Our planet is filled with curiosities and marvels . . . and this wondrous book is your guide!PHILIPPE PETIT, high-wire artist and explorer --Philippe Petit

A travel guide for the most adventurous of tourists . . . a wonderful browse [for] armchair travelers who enjoyed Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York and Frank Warren's PostSecret. Library Journal --Library Journal