Peruse rare tomes like poetry bound in pearls or books with branches and berries growing out of their spines.

The World Wide Web was created in this nondescript corridor at CERN.

Bali's remote "gateway to heaven" is one of the most sacred places on the island.

Some 20,000 dust-covered unwanted vehicles languish in the desert.

A fairytale island floats in the middle of Italy's little-known Lake Orta.

The Andean town where every single building is decorated with a brightly colored frieze.

A futuristic hovertrain is parked unceremoniously alongside a nondescript road.

Browse through roughly 130,000 titles in the world's largest independent video rental store.

This magnificent stepwell is designed as an inverted temple and adorned with 1,500 sculptures.

Wooden sleds have replaced donkeys to cart goods around this utterly charming car-free village.

This architectural stunner is one of the few surviving Egyptian Revival theaters in the U.S.

A collection of the specialized tools used to construct Japan’s beautiful architecture.

An eclectic collection of artifacts from the Wild West is preserved in a remote fictional pioneer town.

A quirky assortment of musical marvels from around the world.

Reproductions of nine banned oil paintings coyly hidden behind a curtain in a New Mexico conference room.

China’s breathtaking futuristic library is lined floor to ceiling with fake books.

The hottest, driest, and most scenic desert on Earth.

A tiny museum in Esperance, Australia, displays a bunch of space debris from NASA’s Skylab.

Eerie ruins of an abandoned medieval fishing village crumble atop an unforgiving stretch of earth.

An abandoned Byzantine fortress and notorious prison.

A beautiful Arctic museum and nature center preserves the culture of the Sámi people.

This peaceful Sikh gurudwara serves around 50,000 free meals every day within its gilded walls.

The hellish conditions of this abandoned mine that snakes beneath the Pacific Ocean gave it its diabolic name.

Now abandoned, the first public health hospital in the U.S. saw more than one million immigrants from around the world.