Unique Gifts Under $100

The one problem with the big, beautiful art books that so many of us love is that they're physically difficult to read. This elegant bookstand from Assouline solves that problem in style, holding your books for both reading and display. 

Tyler Cole VP, Community

I know it looks kind of like an alien toilet, but this cup is actually modeled on the bizarre zero gravity–friendly design of cups used on the International Space Station. Drink like an astronaut!

Eric Grundhauser Senior Producer

Fire and (what looks like) ice together is an irresistible combo, with a reminder of the work we still have to do.

In daylight, the globe displays a beautiful map of the night sky. In the dark, the globe can be lit from the inside, showcasing beautifully illustrated renderings of well-known constellations.

Blake Olmstead Head of Design

Yes, a stainless steel letter opener might be overkill, but goodness what a gorgeous object. Made by the precision manufacturers at Craighill, a small, Brooklyn purveyor of distinct home goods and accessories.

Tyler Cole VP, Community

"Unexpected, delightful, magical, and utterly cool!" — Sascha West, Vermont

Whether you’re a veteran backcountry skier or a backyard builder, this instructive yet whimsical manual will take you through the process of constructing and inhabiting a range of useful snow structures.

Larissa Hayden

Dozens of towns around the world that have given themselves over to books and bookshops, and with this guide you can imagine visiting them all!

Sarah Laskow Senior Writer

No, it won’t keep perfect time, but this laser-cut wooden clock is a lot of fun to build. And even more fun to show people

Joshua Foer Co-Founder

Every passing minute on this clever clock delivers a slight pattern variation to stop and contemplate.

A hilarious and practical guide by the creator of Dinosaur Comics and writer of Adventure Time, Ryan North! In just 464 pages, you'll learn how to quickly replicate humanity's achievements, just in case you ever accidentally get sent back in time.

Larissa Hayden

Horror. Adventure. Noir. For the first time, your life can actually smell like the genre you wish it was!

Eric Grundhauser Senior Producer

While the beauty of brutalist and concrete architecture still stirs controversy, there's no debate about the beauty of these well designed and wonderfully informative maps from the talented cartographers at Blue Crow Media.

Measure your day in mechanical clacks. Our favorite retro timepiece keeps wasted minutes in check.

Eric Grundhauser Senior Producer

Everyone needs a trebuchet because everyone also occasionally needs to fling things.

A surreal watch for surreal times.

Calamityware offers classic porcelain in throughly modern patterns. This plate featuring a streaking Sasquatch is just one of many playful examples.

The world's first food critic once hosted a dinner party where he served only black foods. Thanks to the decision of a paint company to produce a cookbook organized by color, you can now follow in his monocolor footsteps.

Alex Mayyasi Gastro Obscura Editor

I have this poster hanging above my desk and frequently find myself lost in it. Who knew Kazakhstan was so big? Or that Belgium was so tiny?

Tyler Cole VP, Community

Internationally-renowned photographer Matt Lambros traveled across the United States to document the country's abandoned theaters—from the supposedly haunted Pacific Warner Theatre in Los Angeles to the Orpheum Theatre in New Bedford, MA. 

Both a beautiful object and a useful tool, the pocket-sized Stellarscope displays an accurate celestial map based on your latitude, date, and time of day.

Tyler Cole VP, Community

An exploration of the ways panoramic photography was used in the early 20th century United States, capturing  and memorializing everything from majestic landscapes to work picnics to man-made disasters.

Tyler Cole VP, Community

A favorite toy of my young nephew, even if he did “accidentally” steer it into a losing battle with a ceiling fan.

Tyler Cole VP, Community

Not only are they beautiful miniature works of art, these space-themed lollipops open a world of pun possibilities. Some suggestions: “I love you to the moon and back” and “I thank my lucky stars for you!”

Larissa Hayden

Penned by an impassioned ichthyologist, this book is a surprisingly amusing and delightfully obscure read.

Larissa Hayden

A walking dad joke if there was ever one.

Civilian space tourism isn’t quite ready for blast-off. In the meantime, this poster—which evokes the slew of 1930s-era Works Progress Administration posters that touted America’s national parks—can help armchair astronauts’ imaginations take flight.

Jessica Leigh Hester Senior Editor + Writer

A surviving, signature concession from the now defunct Crystal Beach Amusement Park in Fort Erie, Ontario, loganberry drink is sweet, tart, and an intensely dark purple.

Track your progress towards visiting all 60 of "America's Best Idea" with this attractive poster celebrating the National Parks of the United States.

Sink into an armchair and cozy up to this special book filled with colorful flap caps, scarves, and rare mitten patterns. Through the work captured in this book, the two local authors aim to keep the tradition and culture of Newfoundland knitting alive.

Tao Tao Holmes Director of Special Projects, Experiences

Armchair travel meets tin foil hats in this gorgeously designed book documenting sites around the U.S. where UFOs have been spotted. It’s a photographic road trip through E.T. visitation past and present.

Blake Olmstead Head of Design

Spend a peaceful minute watching ferrous sand, glass, gravity, and magnetism combine to form a spectacle of stalagmites that shifts with each passing second.

The Spomenik Database is a catalog that aims to “explore and demystify” the stunning concrete monuments built across Balkan states in the mid 20th century. These “spomeniks” are often taken out of context in Western media, but their histories are as fascinating as their design.

Abi Inman Senior Audience Development Manager

When I was a kid, I used to charge my older cousins fees for returning borrowed books late. This personal library kit would have made cataloging my collection a whole lot easier.

Jordan Schultz Director of Marketing & Audience

I recently had the phenomenal opportunity to staff Atlas Obscura's Death Valley astronomy and night photography trip alongside Tyler Nordgren, an incredibly talented astronomer and artist. Tyler has not only spent years working with the National Park Service on public science and astronomy education—including writing a book on the subject—but...

Tao Tao Holmes Director of Special Projects, Experiences

Protein-packed chips that come in several flavors, are extremely tasty, and just happen to be made out of crickets.

Cara Giaimo Staff Writer

A timeless practical joke in the form of a wine glass. Designed by an ancient Greek philosopher, it functions like a normal wine glass but spills everywhere when over-filled by the gluttonous.

Larissa Hayden

This bubblegum-hued, peppermint-flavored pig is a Christmas Day tradition in Saratoga Springs, New York. After placing the pink porker in a velvet pouch, each family member gives it a thwack with an accompanying tiny metal mallet and shares a story of their good fortune from the past year. Once everyone...

Sam O'Brien

The Spill Not is both an ingenious demonstration of centripetal force and a foolproof way for a drunkard to carry around his preferred beverage.

Joshua Foer Co-Founder

An herbal tablet and post-meal digestive that improbably became a favorite candy of Indian children in the 80's. Learn more about this nostalgic treat on Gastro Obscura.

A spindly twig that predicts the weather? Think what you will, it's probably just as accurate as your smartphone weather app, or, for that matter, Karen from Mean Girls. Made from "weather-detecting" balsam fir, this elegant 14-inch pseudo-meteorological device curves upwards for clear skies or downwards for rain and snow....

Tao Tao Holmes Director of Special Projects, Experiences

From early computer programmers to the “girl gamers” of the 1990s, Claire Evans does an incredible job of highlighting the important women who are often left out of conventional tellings of internet history. I just finished this book and can see their influence everywhere now—not just in the internet as...

Lex Berko Senior Editor

Baboons do it unashamedly. Coral snakes do it in defense. Parrots don't do it at all. Find out which animals fart and which animals don't in this oddly detailed book.

A vintage necklace is a charming gift. Even more so when the era in question is the upper Cretaceous Period. With a T. rex close to their heart, your recipient will develop a fondness for fossils faster than you can say “mass extinction.”

Ella Morton Contributing Editor

This newly annotated edition of the classic wrests the text from English majors and hands it to STEMers, but also brings the concerns of literature—moral weight, literary device, creativity—to readers at risk of underestimating their importance.

Pass the time by putting together a puzzle representation of Frank Lloyd Wright's unique home, Fallingwater. Between piecing together the blueprints and the house's iconic look, it's bound to amaze the architecture lover in your life.

Samantha Chong Associate Director, Audience Development

“Get your cactus some pants!” CactiPants offers charming 3D-printed cactus and succulent planters modeled after famous Italian landmarks.

Larissa Hayden

Enjoy the illusion of motion with the 18 included picture strips, or become an amateur animator by drawing your own.

Hand-harvested in the Central Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, this salt is made from fruit-fed worms that are toasted and salted along with some Pasilla Mixe chiles.

Tao Tao Holmes Director of Special Projects, Experiences

Learn the basics of photography and make beautiful shadow prints using just the sun, water, and this light sensitive paper.

Larissa Hayden

Beep Boop. Beep Boop. Beep Boop. Beep Boop. I'm an adorable, little tin can robot. Beep Boop.

Jordan Schultz Director of Marketing & Audience

Discover worlds unseen with this beginner field microscope! Perfect for leaves, bugs, and drops of pond water teeming with life.

A well-researched and lively read about one of the most impressive technological achievements of all time: the 1858 laying of a telegraph line crossing the Atlantic and connecting North America to Europe.

Tyler Cole VP, Community

If you love books, you're predisposed to loving fonts, considering as no book would exist without them. This font-astically fascinating book does a deep dive into how a font is created, dispersed, used, and misused (including anachronistically!), and it will having you looking at words on a page with a...

Tao Tao Holmes Director of Special Projects, Experiences

Hide your most important secrets deep in your bookcase. If you're a bibliophile, this book safe will fool the most cunning of thieves.

Jordan Schultz Director of Marketing & Audience

There's nothing like a few drinks to bring a bookclub together, and even better if they're literary themed. With concoctions classically entitled Vermouth the Bell Tolls and Romeo and Julep, you'll get the bookworm party started right.

Jordan Schultz Director of Marketing & Audience

Tuck these tiny wind-up butterflies into an old book or a birthday card and watch the recipient's surprise as they suddenly fly away.

Larissa Hayden

A wall clock pared down to the essentials. Hang it as-is in your minimalist living room, our surround it with family photos for a different looks entirely.

With a bit of time and patience, you can have your own miniature wind-powered robot just like the large scale ones made by Dutch artist Theo Jansen.

Larissa Hayden

Bringing seafood on a long-haul flight may irritate your seatmate for reasons of malodorousness. Solution: shrimp pillow. This soft and comfy neck-encircler brings all the appeal of the briny sea with none of the rough surfaces associated with actual crustaceans.

Ella Morton Contributing Editor

What Oreos are to milk, these French cookies are to Champagne. Residents of Reims have been dunking these millennial pink biscuits in bubbly for over 300 years.

Tyler Cole VP, Community

Stay a safe distance from creepy-crawlers with this one-handed, bug-catching tool and 5x magnifying lens. After a good, close look, initiate the quick-release and send your insect friend unharmed and on its way.

Tyler Cole VP, Community

This delightful, debut children's book by former Atlas Obscura staff writer Sarah Laskow answers important unicorn questions like why are unicorns associated with rainbows, why do some unicorns have wings, and—of course—are unicorns real? 

A feat of human invention and ingenuity in the service of laziness, these spectacles function like a periscope to allow you to watch TV (or read) while lying in bed.

Give a classic arcade feel to any rocker-style light switch. No electrical wiring (or quarters) needed.

Ever notice how the self-appointed hero often only makes matters worse? Show you're not someone in need of rescuing with this bold enamel pin.

Deceptively complex, this wooden puzzle ball is as beautiful to look at as it is challenging to solve.

This 24-hour video of construction workers continually rebuilding the time out of lumber and bolts is a mesmerizing piece of art. I took an old smartphone, installed this app, and now have a beautifully strange clock on my wall.

Joshua Foer Co-Founder

Love table-top and role-playing games? Pin and share that love with this charming little icosahedron.

Knowing your way around rope is like having a secret super power. This little knot-tying set is the perfect pocket-sized introduction to mastering friction, tension, and strain. You'll have the most able set of hands at any camp site, boat dock, or rock face. 

We spotted a very stylish Atlas Obscura event attendee donning this world map necklace. What a wonderful statement piece for a travel-minded fashionista!

Larissa Hayden

“Who doesn't want a dose of existentialism with their egg nog?” — Tamara, Seattle, Washington

Rain delays can ruin even the best-planned adventures, but this waterproof card deck is a great way to wait out the storm. Perfect for the beach as well.

Celebrate Carl Sagan's audacious and mind-bending attempt to explain human life to civilizations outside our galaxy with this enamel pin reproduction of the golden record carried aboard the Voyager space probes.

Tyler Cole VP, Community

Place this miraculous, flopping fish in your palm and learn your future. Don't like what it reveals? No worries, it's a 72-pack.

Wear your heart on your sleeve or anywhere else you might like with this anatomically-correct iron-on patch.

If there's anything can be more divisive than licorice itself, it's likely licorice-flavored toothpaste. What's not debatable, however, is that this beautifully-packaged Italian import will look great next to your bathroom sink.

Tyler Cole VP, Community

My grand uncle used to stock in boxes of Blenheim Ginger Ale at his farm. When I was a kid, it was the first thing I would seek out upon arriving for a weekend stay. I was proud to be the only one of my cousins who could drink the pink...

Luke Thomas Senior Software Engineer

Got dirty hands? Not anymore you don't. A perfect stocking-stuffer for a two-fisted attack on grime.

Tyler Cole VP, Community