According to the locals, the sands of this secluded Norway beach are infused with gemstone particles.

In Rome’s Jewish ghetto, a 200-year-old bakery still makes the neighborhood’s historic sweets.

This 1920s Dutch barge is now a floating bookstore.

Shop for books in the New Orleans house where William Faulkner once lived.

A charming 17th-century alley is lined with secondhand bookstores and antiquarian shops.

Hidden on a cattle ranch in Arizona, this bookstore has been celebrating Southwest literature for more than 40 years.

This enormous secondhand bookstore inside a Victorian train station sparked the "Keep Calm and Carry On" craze.

The tradition of open-air secondhand and antiquarian bookselling in Paris dates back to the Renaissance.

The oldest bookstore in Iceland.

America's most famous museum of medical oddities is home to the remains of Albert Einstein's brain.

This abandoned radar station from the Cold War era now only broadcasts a seriously ominous air of isolation.

The remains of a failed attempt at medieval nerdery are hidden deep in the woods of Virginia.

A train station that was abandoned by the coal industry and was later converted into a cocktail bar.

In the woods of New Jersey lie the ruins of a munitions village abandoned after World War I and the remnants of a 1920s wooden racetrack.

This palatial botanical garden is home to one of the largest pipe organs ever installed in a private residence, and a piece of Wood's cycad.

This might just be the TARDIS of bookstores.

Philadelphia boasts one of the best — and most often overlooked — traditional Japanese gardens in North America.

A museum dedicated to the strange and extravagant costumes and memorabilia of the mummers, a tradition older than Philadelphia itself.

This sacred cavern, 400 feet deep, is home to millions of bats and an ancient burial ground.

In the basement of the U.S. Capitol Building is a hidden storage room full of ornate floor tiles leftover from the 1850s.