Unique Gifts Under $25

This salt lamp provides a beautiful dreamlike glow that helps you wind down and drift off to sleep feeling relaxed. I’ve gifted one to practically all of my girlfriends. If I were Oprah, it would definitely be one of my favorite things.

Sheila Baker Designer

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

The definitive guide to fermentation by the decade's definitive chef.

Tyler Cole VP, Community

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

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

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

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

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

Earthlings have gazed at the dark, star-speckled sky for millennia, and this box of postcards compiles 50 impressions, from the scientific—such images plumbed from Galileo’s notebooks or the NASA archives—to the fanciful.

Jessica Leigh Hester Senior Editor + Writer

One mark of a trip well-traveled is a well-worn map. Skip a step with the waterproof Crumpled City Map, as easy to read as it is to stuff in your pocket.

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.

If there’s nothing more terrifying to you than a blank page, and plain old horizontal lines feel more like prison than prompt, try this notebook of unusual graph paper. Guaranteed to shift your perspective with each new page.

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.

Perfect for both kids and avian-inclined adults, this beautiful box set takes your standard memory game to the next level by highlighting the visual differences in 25 male and female bird pairs.

Tao Tao Holmes Director of Special Projects, Experiences

Invented in France 1955, the wood-handled N°06 is the smallest Opinel pocket knife to feature the manufacturer's iconic locking safety ring.

Tyler Cole VP, Community

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

What better way to stay in touch with the far corners of capitalism than by having obscure industry trade journals sent to your door? My last issues of Elevator World and American Laundry News were positively scintillating.

Joshua Foer Co-Founder

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

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

Larissa Hayden

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

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

The perfect accessory for your next cemetery cocktail party, make any drink more curious with skull-shaped ice.

Paula Mejia Gastro Obscura Associate 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.

See your home and neighborhood through the eyes of the bad guy with this fascinatingly in-depth look at the methods experienced burglars use to "case the joint".

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

Each of the cards in this deck holds a low-stakes challenge. Accept it, and you’ll find yourself paying attention to the shifting textures of the terrain under your feet, keeping watch for circles and squares, or spreading out a picnic in an unexpected place. Pack a few for your next...

Jessica Leigh Hester Senior Editor + Writer

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

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 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

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.

Combine a ship in a bottle, a sea monster, and an enamel pin and you're going to have some very smitten Atlas Obscura employees. What's not to love?

Jordan Schultz Director of Marketing & Audience

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

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

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. 

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

Jordan Schultz Director of Marketing & Audience

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

When lightning strikes the ground, it can fuse some kinds of sand, clay, or soil into glass. This produces a hollow tube called a fulgurite that can suggest the form of a lightning bolt.

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

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

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

If you haven't heard, single-use plastic straws are on their way out. Get ahead of the curve with this elegant and easy-to-clean set of twelve.

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

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.

The packaging of this Svensk Dröm (or Swedish Dream) Sea Salt Soap is so charming you might opt to decorate with it rather than use it, but if you do open the box you'll enjoy a textured round of soap and an invigorating scrub.

Tyler Cole VP, Community

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

Tyler Cole VP, Community