A view of the window in the Great Hall of the Berghof, 1936. (Photo: Bavarian State Library: Heinrich Hoffmann Collection, Picture Archive, Bavarian State Library)

When digging through archives for records of female architects and designers active in the 1930s, Dr. Despina Stratigakos, an architectural historian at the University of Buffalo, came across something unexpected.

She found old files from the Nazi party–and owing to their notoriously meticulous record keeping–they contained invoices for things like wooden chairs, carpets, and velvet curtains. One name in particular kept popping up: that of Gerdy Troost, Adolf Hitler's close confidante and preferred interior designer.

Troost was responsible for decorating Hitler's homes, from apartments in Berlin and Munich, to the Berghof, his vacation residence in the Bavarian Alps. And in the 1930s, this was excellent fodder for the nascent lifestyle magazines that were quickly growing in popularity in the United States. 

Life magazine, the New York Times, and even the American Kennel Club magazine all published lush, full-color spreads of Hitler's domestic life right up until the onset of the Second World War.

Photograph of Eva Braun’s room in the Berghof with a framed Hitler portrait. The print is pasted into one of Eva Braun’s photographic albums. (Photo: Eva Braun Photographic Albums, National Archives, College Park, MD)

One haunting piece, published in the New York Times magazine in August of 1939, portrayed Hitler at home, showing off his tomato garden and his stylish living room. The story's title was "Herr Hitler at Home in the Clouds." The front page of the very same newspaper discussed how Jews were being beaten and their businesses ransacked, while Nazi troops amassed on the Polish border.

"All over the front page was this total, other reality," says Stratigakos. "I really wonder what people thought at the time. How did they compute Hitler growing tomatoes with what they saw on the front page?"

But this was exactly how Hitler's propagandists wanted to portray their leader. At this point, in the late 1930s, it was more of a question of which publication didn't have a "Hitler at Home" story, rather than which one did.

(Photo: Bavarian State Library: Heinrich Hoffmann Collection, Picture Archive, Bavarian State Library)

In Troost's files, sandwiched between receipts and parchment orders, were letters addressed to her from people in concentration camps, mostly Jews, pleading for help. The sobering combination of artifacts intrigued Stratigakos: "I was asking to myself: what do Hitler's curtains have to do with the Third Reich and the Holocaust? Why are these things together?"

These questions dogged her, so she poured herself into researching the life of Hitler's chief designer, and how she played a key role in the Nazi propaganda machine. The result is Stratigakos' upcoming book, Hitler at Home. 

Adolf Hitler escorts a young girl, Rosa Bernile Nienau, to his house on the Obersalzberg. As it turns out, this little girl was half-Jewish. Photograph from Heinrich Hoffman’s “Youth Around Hitler.” (Photo: Heinrich Hoffman, courtesy of Bavarian State Library)

According to Stratigakos, the propaganda machine had two goals for Hitler's public persona: "There was this thundering leader, the messiah on the podium. And then there was this guy who was shown playing with his dogs, who was really relatable and evoked our empathy. The two depictions really worked well together," she continues, "People really like the powerful leader, but one that they could actually relate to."

And making Hitler seem relatable was exactly what his interior designer, Troost, intended to do. "I wanted to show [in the book] that these 'fluff' pieces are not harmless. I want people to pay attention to them," says Stratigakos. "People seem to think, 'Oh it's just decor, or it's mundane, and it doesn't have any moral value to it.' But people need to look at this kind of media as critically as they look at more political media."

World War II had already begun when Life decided to publish photos of Hitler's living spaces, as well as photos of some of his paintings. There's even an image of Hitler bottle-feeding tiny fawns. Apparently, the feature had been planned well before Germany invaded Poland, beginning World War II, but the editors decided to run it anyway. The magazine's editorial staff, naturally aware of world events, decided to write slightly mocking image captions, lampooning Hitler's sensibilities and the hypocrisy of his taste when compared to his leadership style. 

The cover of Heinrich Hoffman’s book, “Hitler Away From It All,” shows Hitler standing with a view of his mountain estate on the Obersalzberg. Hitler helped design the renovated villa and often hosted guests, including journalists and prominent statesmen, at the residence in the 1930s. (Photo: Heinrich Hoffman, courtesy of Bavarian State Library)

But American readers were not happy about this. "People actually wrote in, taking Life magazine to task for treating Hitler sarcastically," says Stratigakos. "One of the letters I remember reading even says something along the lines of, 'you know, Hitler's house is far more tasteful than Roosevelt's.' So the response was really surprising. American readers did not appreciate the magazine making fun of Hitler's taste."

All this while the war had started, and the wheels of industrial genocide had begun to turn. "People bought into this notion of a non-political, domestic Hitler, and this was exactly what the propagandists wanted," notes Stratigakos. "There were built-in audiences for these kind of stories. It's profoundly uncomfortable, and truly haunting."  

Created in partnership with Enjoy Illinois and the Illinois Obscura Society. 

While popular culture tends to associate Route 66 with the West, its roots are solidly Illinois.

During our adventure, we traversed portions of the "Mother Road" from all time periods. Some sections are still major roads, but others require major detours and even walking. And if you make that effort, you'll see such highlights as the famed Buckingham Fountain, a portion of highway paved entirely in red brick, the birthplace of the corn dog, and several giant "muffler men." At last, as the road fades into Missouri, you can cross the unusual and creepy Chain of Rocks Bridge. 

If you choose to duplicate our journey, don't forget that people are a big part of the experience. Henry at the Ra66it Ranch will delight you with his eccentricities and "rabbits," and the folks at the many museums along the way will make you glad you stopped for a glimpse at history.

Route 66 is not the fastest way to traverse the state, but it's the best way to experience a lingering echo of the American Dream.

Sign up to find out more about the back room tours, unusual adventures, and incredible parties that Atlas Obscura will be putting on in Chicago and greater Illinois.

A debutante ball in the 1930s. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

“I'm deeply reconsidering my career choice,” a distraught fellow lighting designer tells me. It's 5 a.m. on the morning of a massive society ball in New Orleans. In just a few hours the room will fill with young girls in white princess gowns and old men in tuxedos.

By that evening, everyone who is not an underage debutante will be spilling their wine, taking out entire table garnishes and injuring themselves on the dance floor as I watch it all from a spotlight tower. 

In New Orleans, debutante balls and cotillions are usually held in elaborately styled ballrooms in fine hotels facing the Mississippi River. These events are like senior proms turned up to 11, but with grandparents and prancing stallions invited along for the ride. The design aesthetic for many balls resembles a particularly gaudy stage set of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Crystal-encrusted ball gowns are not uncommon.

These celebrations are the high point of society season in many moneyed Southern enclaves. But behind every blow-out cotillion and debutante ball is a production crew working to ensure that all the weirdness goes smoothly–or as smoothly as it can possibly go when most attendees are drinking very, very heavily.

A view from the spotlight tower. Photos of the events are discouraged. (Photo: April Siese)

I've worked in lights and audio at debutante balls for four years. When I arrive, I'm handed a detailed script that usually includes the evening's program as well as biographies about each young socialite making their debut, which I will read out in a very serious voice while trying not to giggle when their “carriages” are assessed, like prize racehorses.

At their briefest, the descriptions run around two to three sentences. It's usually the youngest girls, aged 11 or 12, making their first excruciatingly slow walk around the narrow pathway lined by society royalty that get the shortest spiel. The longest introductions, for college-age debs, drag on for pages and pages, detailing everything from the person in question's hopes and dreams to their hobbies. 

The balls perpetuate a slice of old New Orleans high society that is avidly covered by the local newspapers; the Times-Picayune actually published short profiles and photos of each of this year's 65 debs. Beautillion balls–the male equivalent of the archaic pageantry–are few and far between. 

I've seen five-man teams holding up trains of heavy dresses, or frantically working to set up garish thrones that probably cost more than the rest of the entire event. Extensive, ineffective stage set-ups are just as common, with bands vying for the drunken attention of guests as fervently as if they were playing for tips and not a hefty appearance fee.

Hotels by the river in New Orleans, including the Hilton (far left), often host the balls. (Photo: InfrogmationofNewOrleans/flickr)

As for me, I’m usually off to the side in a spotlight tower, armed with only a headset and a spotlight. This presents its own problems when attendees get too rowdy. I've had my scaffolding rocked hard enough to send objects flying to the ballroom below and the folds of my scissor lift impaled by empty wine bottles. It's pretty hard to come down from this perch without crunching glass, but no one seems to notice or care since there's a fine layer of black fabric masking the machinery.

At the height of my job duties, I am programming the lights we've arranged and calling the show as it progresses. We’re given walkie talkies in order to stay in contact with the society belles who are calling the real shots, but most of them would rather make endless loops around the tables than talk to the “hired help.” We generally make it up as we go along, as drunken debutantes have a fairly high tendency of going rogue. The parties and our job duties in between can drag to 18 hours or more.

I've heard “Monster Mash” followed by “A Christmas Song” requested to end a ball, the house band confused but amiable. Trios of drunk women have followed me to bathrooms in the bowels of hotels because they were too plastered to find the facilities just outside the ballroom. I've witnessed full meltdowns with suit-clad men falling over on broken chairs and lamenting god knows what while harried carpenters pull pallet jacks filled with set pieces through to a loading dock at 4 a.m.

Debutantes in Australia in 1953. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

I've been tipped $20 to slow dance with a drunken, sweaty father of a debutante to Michael Jackson's “PYT” because I'd just hopped off my spotlight tower and happened to be within his line of sight. I've acted as an impromptu security guard when guests deemed the band not energetic enough and attempted to rush the stage with their own requests for songs and special frenetic dance moves in mind. I've certainly lost track of the crying, punch-drunk attendees seeking purses and handbags after their nights had escaped from their silken gloved grasps.

The meltdowns aren't exclusive to the socialites we cater to, of course. That same lighting designer panicking about his profession has had to talk down fellow crew members when things have gone perilously wrong. I've been on the other side of the phone helping a coworker troubleshoot on the morning of the biggest ball in the city. But each time I'd give advice, a Marine Band practicing in the background would blare their horns loud enough to fill the Superdome, rendering conversation impossible.

Predictably, as soon as we had hung up the phone, the band dispersed and all was silent until the red carpet rolled out and the royalty filed in.

How the stones might have looked before they were buried (Image: LBI ArchPro, Juan Torrejón Valdelomar, Joachim Brandtner)

Just under two miles from Stonehenge, there's another large monument called Durrington Walls. It's a huge circle of mounded earth, about a mile in circumference, and for years it was thought to have been made about the same time as Stonehenge.

But now a team of archaeologists re-examining the earth around the famous monument have found evidence for stones at Durrington Walls, too—90 of them, 15 feet feet tall, at least as old, if not older, than Stonehenge itself.

For the past few years, the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project has been scanning the land around Stonehenge in search of more information about the context in which the ring of stones stood. They used advanced scanning technology to examine the ground without excavating, and when they looked at Durrington Walls, they found about 30 intact stones buried under the mound, as well as many more stones that are broken apart or deep pits in which stones once stood, around 4,500 years ago.

Like Stonehenge, Durrington Walls aligns with the solstice. The stones are all in a row along the southern edge of the semi-circle. It's a new clue that Stonehenge was not a lonely monument on a hilltop; it existed in a larger realm of stone monuments and rituals that we're just starting to learn about.

Bonus finds: a Stravinsky score, Ice Age fossils

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Sidney Pressey's 1920s teaching machine. (Photo: Gomer Bolstrood/Public domain)

Classrooms where each student learns by staring intensely at their own gadget may seem to be a millennial phenomenon. But individual machines designed for educational enrichment have been around for almost a hundred years—albeit with more cranks and levers than your average MacBook Air.

In the 1920s, Ohio State University educational psychology professor Sidney Pressey developed a shoebox-sized teaching machine to allow students to test their knowledge without a teacher’s direct guidance. The device, which Pressey called a “machine for intelligence tests” and an “Automatic Teacher," contained a roll of paper printed with a test key, which was displayed one question at a time. Presented with each question, a student would press one of four to five numbered or lettered selectors to indicate their answer, then pull a lever to submit it.

If the answer was correct, the next question would appear. If not, the same question stayed, and the student would have to try again. Only the right answer would move the roll of paper forward.

A diagram from Pressey's teaching machine patent, filed in 1928. (Image: Google Patents)

It all sounds a little dry, but at the time, this automation of learning tickled the fancies of more pedagogically inclined folks. As University of British Columbia Media and Technology Studies professor Stephen Petrina notes, educators who used the machine when it was exhibited in the 1920s enjoyed “something of a psychological thrill when they hit the right key.” 

Although the Automatic Teacher was capable of eliciting excitement, it did not catch on. Convinced of his machine's merits, Pressey worked tirelessly for years to improve it, get financial backing for it, and introduce it to classrooms far and wide. But educators “failed to grasp the value of automating the processes of teaching and learning,” writes Petrina.

The machine fizzled. Reflecting on the whole disappointing experience in the journal School and Society in 1932, Pressey said: “The writer has found from bitter experience that one person alone can accomplish relatively little, and he is regretfully dropping further work on these problems.” Nonetheless, he maintained the prediction he expressed in a 1926 letter that "extensive use of mechanical aids in education is a probable development of the near future."

B.F. Skinner's Teaching Machine. (Photo: Silly rabbit/Wikipedia)

Pressey may not have experienced the commercial success for which he had hoped, but he did make an impact that would resonate decades later. In the 1950s, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner—known as the father of operant conditioning—debuted what he referred to as his “teaching machine.” Skinner’s patent for the device, filed in 1958, described it as an “apparatus for the teaching of arithmetic, spelling, and so forth.”

The machine, a metal box with a small window and roll of paper on the top and a lever on the side, displayed either a question, incomplete phrase, or math problem in the window. The student would write his or her answer on the roll of paper, press the lever, and their answer would disappear as the solution was revealed in the window.

The aim of the machine was to keep students engaged and interested in learning by allowing them to work at an individual pace while providing instant feedback. Instead of handing in test papers, then waiting a day for a teacher to grade them, students would know immediately whether their answer was right or wrong. This approach, Skinner said in a 1956 instructional video about his teaching machines, kept a student “free of anxiety about his success or failure.”

Teaching machines turned learning into a game with thousands of easily accessible questions—essentially, the levels of a game. “In studying by machine something is happening all the time,” wrote Skinner in 1960. Students were challenged in a series of small steps and experienced the positive feelings of being right and earning the opportunity to advance to the next level. The acquisition of knowledge happened along the way. “Many of them say that it is a weird experience,” said Skinner: “they know something at the end of the hour which they cannot remember having learned.”

As with Pressey's machine, Skinner's version was not a wild success. In a lecture delivered in 1965, Skinner reflected on the adoption and usage of his teaching machines, which he regarded as “widely misunderstood.” The machines were not, he said, “simply devices which mechanize functions once served by human teachers.” The aim was to make both teachers' and students lives easier by letting a machine handle some of the rote and automated tasks involved in learning. 

The relationship between the machine and its user was intended to be an interaction between the person who programmed the answers and the student. “It is the author of the program, not the machine, who teaches,” said Skinner in his video. The machines were intended to be a sort of interactive textbook that would allow living, breathing teachers in the classroom to identify areas in which individual students were having trouble.

Though they were regarded as little more than diverting curiosities during their time, Pressey and Skinner's teaching machines are fascinating in the context of current debates over the role of technology in the classroom. Ultimately, the conclusion is the same: regardless of the complexity of their innards, machines are best regarded as learning tools rather than teachers.

Fall is now officially ice cream season. (Photo: Ruth Hartnup/Flickr)

If you hear someone groaning “this is the hottest day ever” today, they may be correct—within certain parameters. As the weather ignores the calendar, and large swaths of the United States continue to languish in the high 80s and low 90s, meteorologists say quite a few daily high temperature records are set to fall this week.

Yesterday, record temps for September 7th blistered Newark, New Jersey (which hit 94 degrees), while Hartford, Connecticut and Burlington, Vermont tied their previous highs, at 93 and 94 degrees respectively. Today, hypothetical thermometers threaten to burst in New York City, Albany, Boston, Providence, and Baltimore. Each will have to top out in the mid 90s to beat previous September 8th records—NYC’s has stood at 93 degrees since 1919. 

Meanwhile, across the country, highs are rising “5-20 degrees above average,” pushing some California cities into triple digits, and putting the fear of God into their benchmarks, too.

Experts promise this stovescape is indeed fleeting—the jet stream, a set of high-atmosphere winds that cool the earth down like a giant mobile ceiling fan, is heading back onshore later in the week, bringing saner temperatures with it. In the meantime, if the mercury creeps high enough and there’s no champagne on hand, consider cracking open a fire hydrant. 

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

 In 2009 an Airbus A130 went down near the Comoros Islands between Africa and Madagascar. 152 people were killed in the crash. A fourteen year old girl, Bahia Bakari, clung to a piece of aircraft wreckage for over nine hours before being rescued. 

In 1942,  Poon Lim, was serving aboard a British merchant ship when it was struck by a German U-Boat's torpedo. Lim spent the next 133 days at sea surviving on fish, birds blood, and rainwater before being rescued by Brazilian fishermen. He still holds the record for time spent on a life raft. 

In 2006 an explosion blasted through the Sago Mine in West Virginia. Thirteen miners were trapped. They attempted to create a  barricade to keep out the deadly methane gas that was leaking in. It took 41 hours for a rescue crew to get to them. Only Randal McCloy, Jr. a 27 year old miner was left alive. 

All of these are cases of disasters that left only one person alive. Called "sole survivors" the term is most commonly associated with airplane crashes. While often touted as a kind of miracle, sole survivors are left with a very heavy burden. They often suffer from PTSD and intense guilt over why it was them that survived and no others.

However, no instance of sole survivorship comes close the scale of what happened to Ludger Sylbaris in 1902. One day a drunk in a town of 30,000 and the next day the only person left alive. As Barnum and Bailey would one day call him, he was "the man who survived doomsday."

Photo: Richard Masoner/ Flickr

The road you grew up on undoubtedly holds its own, personally meaningful mythology. But all of the meaningful adventures that took place on, say, McClelland Street probably can't match the stories behind bizarro destinations like Bucket of Blood Street, Mountain Man Road, or Zzyzx Road. Here are seven incredible stories behind seven strangely named roads. 

1. SHADES OF DEATH ROAD
Independence Township, New Jersey 

Photo: Daniel Case/Wikipedia

The story behind New Jersey's Shades of Death Road is as shady as you might think. There does not seem to be a definitive history behind the road's grim name, but rather a number of legends—none of which are very pleasant.

Most theories agree that the road was once known as "The Shades," thanks to the thick forest canopy that hangs over it. The second part of the name has been attributed to a number of different occurrences, including a group of bandits that once made part of the road their hideout in order to attack travelers. Another theory says that the swampy conditions around the road were once home to a nasty mosquito population, which spread a deadly outbreak of malaria. Then, of course, there are stories that say the road got its name thanks to a bunch of murders that took place nearby.

Whatever the truth is, Shades of Death Road has become so popular thanks to its ghoulish name that the locals have had to grease the sign pole to keep people from shimmying up it and stealing the sign.      

2. MOUNTAIN MAN ROAD
Gehlaur, India

Photo: Google Maps

India's Dashrath Manjhi Road, better known as "Mountain Man Road," is not dedicated to to a grizzled American frontiersman, but instead to a fanatically determined widower who devoted his life to improving his remote community.

Dashrath Manjhi lived in a village near a dangerous, rocky spine known as the Gehlour Hills. With a number of essential services located on the far side of the hills, many people from Manjhi's town had to either trek dozens of miles each day to circumvent the hills, or risk scaling them. Manjhi's wife, Faguni Devi, was making the journey across the hills in 1959 when she fell and severely injured herself. Unable to reach medical help on the far side of the hills, she died from her injuries.

After this incident, Manjhi resolved that such a tragedy would not happen again, and he began to attack the very ground where his wife fell. For 22 years Manjhi continued to chip away at the hills, determined to create a road that would connect his town to the world on the other side. Finally in 1982, after decades of back-breaking labor in the face of ridicule from the locals, Manjhi completed the road, which was named after him. During his labors he earned the nickname "The Mountain Man," which as since been passed on to his road.     

3. DEAD WOMEN CROSSING
Weatherford, Oklahoma

Photo: Nate/Flickr

There are a million Dead Man's Curves around the world, but Oklahoma may have the only Dead Woman's Crossing.

On maps this isolated intersection is listed as "Dead Women Crossing," but it is the story of one woman that gives the junction its name. It was July, 1905 when Katy DeWitt James and her infant daughter boarded a train in Custer City headed for Ripley, Oklahoma. She would never reach her destination. Weeks went by and no one heard a thing from the single mother. A detective named Sam Bartell was put on her trail, and soon discovered the tragic truth: It seems that James had left the train early with one Fannie Norton, reportedly a local prostitute in the town of Weatherford. Norton, James, and James' baby took a ride out to a local creek, but only Norton and the baby returned.

Norton dropped off the baby, said to have been covered in blood, at a local farm, and went on the lam. Bartell quickly tracked her down and brought her in, but Norton poisoned herself immediately after being questioned. James' remains were found two weeks later beneath a wooden wagon crossing. The motive and full events surrounding the killing were never discovered, although James' ex-husband is thought to have had a hand in her death. The wooden crossing is long since gone, but a cement junction now stands on the spot where James' body was found. Dead Women Crossing has never been a creepier name. 

4. BUCKET OF BLOOD STREET
Holbrook, Arizona

Photo: Peter Eimon/Flickr

Nothing like a history of Wild West violence to give your street name some added ZAZZ!

Bucket of Blood Street is a solid reminder of Holbrook, Arizona's gunslinging past, and one gunfight in particular that would give the road the name it still bears today. During the 1880s, Holbrook was a prototypical Wild West town full of gambling, prostitution, casually violent cowboys, and a near-nonexistent law enforcement presence, specifically referred to as being “too tough for women and churches.”

One of the proverbial thunderheads of this storm of sin was Terrill’s Cottage Saloon, where, in 1886, a gunfight erupted that was said to have drenched the floors with a bucket of blood. The fight apparently started due to a disagreement over a poker game, but whatever the cause, the result was the same: the saloon became known as the Bucket of Blood Saloon.

The sensationally titled saloon survived as the town cleaned up its act and moved into the 20th century, eventually becoming a Route 66 tourist trap. Today the saloon is gone, but the street name remains, proving that washing away that much blood is harder than it might seem. 

5. GOING-TO-THE-SUN ROAD
West Glacier, Montana 

Photo: Trevor Bexon/Flickr

While it is narrow and often treacherous, Montana's Going-To-The-Sun Road is considered one of the most scenic byways in the country, and it is this beauty that gave the road its name. Maybe.

Going-to-The-Sun Road is named after Going-to-The-Sun Mountain, which can be seen as drivers head down its length. The road, the only one which cuts entirely across Glacier National Park, was completed in 1932, but the name goes back much farther.

Going by the 1933 press release about the road, it (or more correctly, the mountain) was named after a local legend that talks of the deity Sour Spirit, who came down from the sun to teach the Blackfeet tribe the secrets of hunting. As the spirit departed, it is said that he left his image at the top of the mountain to continue to inspire the people. But this might not be the case.

According to a 1986 book about explorer James Willard Schultz, it states the mountain was given its name by Schultz as he pondered the at-the-time unnamed range along with his Native American hunting companion. Given that it was released in an official opinion, it seems to be that the name is based on the local legend. Either way, the road is really damn beautiful.       

6. RAGGED ASS ROAD
Yellowknife, Canada

Photo: CambridgeBayWeather/Wikipedia

This awesomely named Canadian road might be a bit crass, but when you consider the name it's replacing, it really doesn't seem that bad.

In the 1940s, during the heyday of gold mining in the area of Yellowknife, Canada, the road that is now known as Ragged Ass was informally known as "Privy Road" thanks to the abundance of outhouses that dotted its corridor. In 1970, local miner Lou Rocher, who owned a number of plots on the road, was sitting around with a group of friends and a bunch of beer when they came up with another name of questionable suitability.

Rocher and his fellow miners had been working all season with little to show for it. He jokingly dubbed the stretch "Ragged Ass Road," in honor of how poor it was. The new name stuck, much to the chagrin of local city officials.

Rocher put up a number of makeshift signs at first, which kept getting stolen, but soon local business caught on and souvenirs with the name began being sold. Before long the name was too big to fail and it became official. People have continued to steal the real sign, so it has been welded to to its pole, which just makes the whole thing look even more ragged ass.  

7. ZZYZX ROAD
Zzyzx, California

Photo: Christopher Mann McKay/Wikipedia

Zzyzx is the last on this list, and was in fact invented by a huckster to be the last word in the English language. While this stunt didn't stick, the road that took its name certainly did.

Self-appointed doctor and minister Curtis Howe Springer established the Zzyzx Mineral Springs and Healing Center on a mosquito haunted plot in the Mojave desert in 1944. The radio preacher and professional huckster gathered up down-on-their-luck residents from Los Angeles' Skid Row, and trucked them out to his newly acquired miracle site with the promise of food and shelter. Together they built a dubious, but extensive healing spa complete with a hotel, a landing strip, and even an artificial lake.

The center promoted a number of healing tonics including a fountain-of-youth concoction called Antedeluvian Tea and an anti-baldness remedy known as Mo-Hair. But the most lasting aspect of Springer's scheme was to name the area and the road leading to it Zzyzx, a made-up word that he claimed was the last in the English language—just as his center was the last word in healing.

The healing center remained in business for decades, but eventually Springer's shady dealings caught up to him and he and his followers were kicked off the land in 1974. But with nothing else to name the area, the name stuck. Since Zzyzx has not been entered as a true word in the English language, zyzzyva—a type of weevil—seems to hold the record. 

A giant virus (Photo: PNAS)

Deep in the Siberian permafrost, the giants have been frozen.

"Giant", though, being a relative term—these are viruses that measure more than half a micron, which, for this type of life, is spectacularly large. 

A little over a decade ago, a team of scientists in France discovered the first giant virus; since then, they have identified a only couple more. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, they report on their newest find, Mollivirus sibericum, which measures .6 microns. And, they say, they're thinking about waking it up.

Where do giant viruses come from? As Radiolab explains, they may once have been much more common—the smaller viruses we're familiar with may have actually shrunk down from giant viruses into the teeny systems of today. 

Like modern viruses, these frozen giant viruses do have the potential to infect people. Part of the reason that the scientists want to defrost the giant virus in safe lab conditions is to better understand it, before warming Arctic conditions open up permafrost for oil drilling and viruses like this one are released unwittingly.

Should this worry us? Maybe. "The fact that two different viruses retain their infectivity in prehistorical permafrost layers should be of concern in a context of global warming," the scientists write in their abstract. "Giant viruses’ diversity remains to be fully explored."

Bonus finds: A tunnel near the Nazi gold train, a pink dolphin

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

(Photo: Library of Congress)

The fact that Anne Bonny and Mary Read ever crossed paths at all is almost unbelievable. Of the thousands of pirates active in the Caribbean during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, we know the names of just two female marauders. In 1719, the pair would forge an improbable friendship that would start on the high seas and end less than two years later in a damp, dark jail in Spanish Town, Jamaica.

If the splendidly named 1724 tome A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates is to be believed, Mary and Anne’s lives diverged early on from most women of the period. According to author Captain Charles Johnson (believed to be a pseudonym, possibly for Daniel Defoe), “the odd incidents of their rambling lives are such, that some may be tempted to think the whole story no better than a novel or romance.”

Born in England, Mary Read was brought up by her mother as a boy–her dead brother, in fact. Mary’s mother had originally married a sailor and had a son. When her husband was presumed lost at sea, she had an affair with another man. She soon became pregnant with Mary, and left the house of her mother-in-law to hide the birth. Mary's brother died soon after she was born, and her destitute mother came up with a plan. She pretended that Mary was the dead boy and asked her mother-in-law to take care of them financially. The ruse worked.

According to Johnson, after her grandmother died, Mary was sent to work as a boy page for an aristocratic French woman. But “growing bold and strong, and also having a roving mind,” she ran away and “entered herself onboard a man-of-war,” still dressed as a teenage boy. 

Over in Cork, Ireland, Johnson claims that Anne Bonny experienced a similarly odd childhood. Born in 1702, Anne’s father was William Cormac, a married lawyer who had an affair with his maid, Peg. If Johnson is to be believed, Cormac dressed young Anne as a boy clerk at his law firm for reasons of economy and trickery. Eventually, William decided to start a new life in America with Anne and Peg. They settled in the Carolina colonies, and the family prospered. 

Anne, now clothed as a girl, grew into a teenager of “fierce and courageous temper.” It was rumored that she killed a female servant during a fight, and beat up a man who attempted to rape her. When she was sixteen, Anne ran off to the Caribbean with a shady sailor named James Bonny. 

An illustration of Mary Read stabbing another pirate. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

While Anne made do in the notorious pirate’s haven of New Providence Island, Mary served valiantly as a foot soldier in the Flemish army. She soon fell in love with a fellow soldier, and after revealing her true sex to him in a tent, they were married. They left the army and opened a popular inn in Holland. But her husband soon died, and Mary was left destitute. 

Once again, she assumed a male identity and ended up on a merchant ship bound for the West Indies. Her ship was soon overtaken by pirates, and Mary joined the crew. Though she would later say that “the life of the pirate was what she always abhorred,” and that she “went into it only upon compulsion,” her actions showed otherwise. Over the next few years, she proved herself to be a fearless bandit with excellent navigational skills, thriving in a brutal, exhausting world. 

For her part, Anne continued her wild, reckless ways. She soon began an affair with a small-time pirate named “Calico” Jack Rackham. Known for his flamboyant clothes, it was said he seduced Anne much like he overtook a ship, with “no time wasted, straight alongside, every gun brought to play, and the prize boarded.” Anne soon ran off to join him in a life of piracy and plunder. It was rumored that she would often board a targeted ship dressed as a woman, flirting with the captain while she secretly cased the joint. Later, when Calico Jack’s crew boarded the vessel she’d be among them, dressed as a man with guns blazing, coolly threatening that if they made a noise, she would “blow out their brains.”

The fateful meeting of these two “fierce hell cats” occurred when Calico Jack’s crew overtook the ship Mary Read was currently crewing. Mary joined Calico Jack’s gang. Legend has it that Anne became attracted to the feminine man with the high pitched voice. When Mary revealed her true gender to Anne, it only deepened their friendship–which some say turned to romance. 

In a fit of jealousy, Calico Jack threatened Anne that he would “cut her new lovers throat.” To appease him, Anne and Mary let him in on Mary’s secret–and many say the three entered into a piratical ménage-a-trios. Captain Thomas Dillon reported that when the women were raiding his sloop,“both [were] profligate, cursing and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do anything on board.” 

Anne Bonny. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Transcripts of their subsequent trial survive. Ship passenger Dorothy Spenlow recounted her experience with Anne and Mary:  

Two women, prisoners at the bar, were then on board the said sloop, and wore men’s jackets, and long trousers, and handkerchiefs tied about their heads; and that each of them had a machete and pistol in their hands, and cursed and swore at the men, to murder the deponent; and that they should kill her, to prevent her coming against them; and the deponent further said, that the reason of her knowing and believing them to be women then was by the largeness of their breasts.

Personal drama on board continued. According to Johnson, Mary fell in love with a sweet, inexperienced sailor. When another pirate challenged him to a duel, she picked a fight with the pirate and scheduled an earlier duel with him. She shot the pirate dead. 

According to Johnson, one of the gang’s prisoners asked Mary, then disguised as a man, why she had chosen this brutal way of life: 

Where her life was continually in danger by fire or sword; and not only so, but she must be sure of dying an ignominious death, if she be taken alive? She answer’d, that as to hanging she thought it no great hardship, for, were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn pyrate, and so infest the seas…if it was put to the choice of the pyrates, they would not have the punishment less that death, the fear of which, kept some dastardly rogues honest.

Calico Jack’s gang roamed the seas and minor ports of the Caribbean, targeting mid-sized commercial ships. After they raided a ship called the William, Captain Woodes Rogers, Governor of the Bahamas, issued the following proclamation on Sept 5, 1720. It was reprinted in the Boston Gazette: 

Whereas John Rackum, George Featherstone, John Davis, Andrew Gibson, John Howell, Noah Patrick, and two Women, by name Ann Fulford alias Bonny, & Mary Read, did on the 22nd of August last combine together to enter on board, take, steal and run away with, out of this Road of Providence, a Certain Sloop call’d the William, Burthen about 12 tons, mounted with 4 great Guns and 2 swivel ones, also Ammunition, Sails, Rigging, Anchor, Cables, and a Canoe owned and belonging to Capt. John Ham, and with the said Sloop did proceed to commit Robbery and Piracy . . . the said John Raceme and his said Company are hereby proclaimed Pirates and Enemies to the Crown of Great Britain, and are to be so treated and Deem’d by all his Majesty’s Subjects.

Jack Rackham, aka Calico Jack. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

There was a bounty on Calico Jack’s crew, so the governor of the Bahamas sent several sloops out to find the bandits. A captain by the name of John Barnett finally caught up with them in Negril Bay. When Barnett boarded the pirate ship, he found only Anne Bonny and Mary Read ready for a fight. Their crewmen were all drunk below deck. It was reported the women yelled, "Come up, you cowards, and fight like men!” Instead of fighting, many of the pirates surrendered. The next morning they were all taken to the Spanish Town Jail. The adventure was over. 

On November 17, 1720, Calico Jack and ten of his men were sentenced to death. Anne and Mary were tried separately, at a later trial. The day he was hung, Calico Jack had a special visitor: Anne. According to Johnson, “by special favor, he was admitted to see her; but all the comfort she gave him was, that she was sorry to see him there, but if he had fought like a man, he need not have been hang’d like a dog.” 

Mary and Anne were tried on November 28^th and were found guilty of piracy. Sir Nickolas Lawes, governor of Jamaica, pronounced the following sentence:  

You Mary Read, and Anny Bonny, alias Bon, are to go from hence to the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution; where you shall be severally hanged by the neck till you are severally dead. And God of his infinite mercy be merciful to both your souls. 

But the women saved their special trump card until they were sentenced. It turned out they were both pregnant. After an examination proved this claim, the pair were allegedly kept in adjoining cells to await the birth of their children. Mary Read died of a fever before her child was born, and was buried on April 28, 1721, in the Jamaican province of St. Catherine. 

Anne Bonny’s fate is unknown. Some say her father bailed the then-19-year-old out of jail and brought her to Charleston, South Carolina, where she married a man named James Burleigh and had many children. There is also a legend that the two women escaped together to Louisiana, where they spent their old age recounting their romantic exploits on the high seas–but this is highly unlikely.

What seems pretty indisputable is that their legendary friendship helped them through their highest highs and lowest lows. Even tough pirate chicks need a BFF.

This is part of a series about early female explorers. Previous installments can be found here.

 A soldier, possibly Peter Prendys, helps Wojtek engage in his favorite activity—snacking. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

As the Syrian conflict escalates, millions of families have fled the country, searching for safer, better lives in more stable parts of the world; meanwhile, those other parts of the world struggle to gauge whether they can or should accept them. Their stories, and the pleas of the many citizens who want to take them in, bring to mind one refugee who did great things not just for his adoptive country, but for his entire adoptive species—Wojtek, a Syrian brown bear who, by banding together with Polish soldiers, helped the Allies win a crucial World War II victory, and lifted the spirits of people who really needed it.

In the 1940s, as military powers shattered the boundaries of Europe, the people who lived there were violently shuffled around like so many puzzle pieces. Many residents of Poland, who had been shipped to camps in Siberia after their country was divvied up between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, found themselves adrift when alliances shifted and they were released from the Gulags in 1941. Free, but far from home, people of all ages traveled by foot from Siberia to various destinations. Some found purpose, and a place to go, after the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement, which allowed for commander Władysław Anders to form a Polish army on Soviet soil. 

By March 1942, the army was too large for the Soviet authorities to feed, so they set off to join the British High Command in the Middle East. It was a long, rough walk, stretches of march punctuated by encounters with others whose lives had been similarly disrupted by the war. For the 22nd Artillery Supply Company, one of these encounters was with a shepherd boy who was hungry enough to approach the soldiers, and ended up trading a burlap sack for a Swiss army knife, a chocolate bar, and a tin of beef. But the most fateful was with the resident of said burlap sack—a tiny bear cub, recently orphaned by hunters.

An army dog eyes the new recruit in 1942. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

The shepherd had likely been planning to raise the cub as a dancing bear—not a great job for trainer or animal. Instead, the soldiers took him on as a mascot. They named him Wojtek (short for Wojciech, which means "joyful warrior") to instill a fighting spirit in him. They weaned him on condensed milk from an empty vodka bottle, and assigned him a caretaker, a soldier named Peter Prendys who had also been separated from his family in the conflict. 

Soon, the 22nd Artillery reached their destination—the town of Gedera, on the edge of the Negev desert in what was then Palestine. Prendys quickly set about teaching the bear how to be a good soldier, marching next to him in the desert heat, training him to wave and salute, and, occasionally, disciplining him when he stole from the provision tent. 

Wojtek took to the job. He spent his cubhood as a particularly precocious Army brat, hanging his head out of the artillery truck window during supply runs to Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Lebanon (and later, when he got too big, stowing away in the truck bed). Between missions, he hung out in the camp, begging shamelessly for snacks, racing with the camp dog (a large Dalmatian), and climbing palm trees. He took on a variety of soldierly habits—he developed a taste for lit cigarettes, which he would puff on once before swallowing, and loved beer so much that when he had exhausted a bottle, he would peer into it, "waiting patiently for more." At night, he wrestled with the men—he generally went easy—and then joined them around the campfire (and, sometimes, in their tents to sleep). In the morning he woke up and immediately sought out whoever was on early patrol. If left alone for too long, he would put his head in his hands and whimper. 

A Syrian brown bear enjoys the water. (Photo: Stahlkocher/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Wojtek was no show bear, though. Once, he even caught a spy. A thick-coated animal stationed in a hot desert, Wojtek's favorite treat was a cold shower. He went to great lengths to procure them, standing near the bathing tent and whining until a sympathetic soldier turned the nozzle on him, or decided to dig him a mud bath. Eventually, he learned to turn the shower on himself, and spent so much time there that he was banned from entering without supervision. One day he was delighted to find the door open, but when he barged in, he interrupted a local dissident who had planned on stealing the stockpiled ammunition. The poor guy screamed and surrendered. Wojtek got two beers and unlimited shower time that day. 

His curiosity got him into other scrapes, too—he once stole an entire clothesline's worth of women's underwear from a Polish signals unit during a supply run to Iraq—but he kept his record clean enough that, when the 22nd Artillery was set to ship out to Italy to join the Allies for a major campaign, he was able to officially enlist. Now with a rank and number—and, most importantly, guaranteed rations—Private Wojtek set out for Italy with the rest of the unit on February 13th, 1944. The Italian campaign was long and strenuous—"very often it was necessary to drive day and night, our heavy lorries filled with munitions and other military materials," remembers Professor Wojciech Narebski, a member of the regiment. During this time, he says, just the sight of their "extraordinary nice mascot" lifted their spirits.

A 22nd Artillery Badge, bearing the image of Wojtek carrying a shell. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

But Wojtek became famous for lifting other things. Just a few months after their arrival in Italy, the 22nd Artillery found themselves thrown into the Battle of Monte Cassino, the largest European land conflict of the war, and the cause of over 60,000 eventual casualties. The German army had turned the small mountain pass into a stronghold for their defensive line, and the Allies needed to break through in order to move on to Rome. Wojtek's unit was tasked with driving huge trucks of ammunition to enemy lines via steep winding mountain passes, unloading the stuff, and then driving back to the stockpiles. 

During the battle it was all hands on deck, and Wojtek was left alone. But the bear, at this point, essentially thought of himself as a soldier—or, at the very least, had learned that copying what people did earned him praise, attention, and treats. So when he saw soldiers carrying the crates of shells from the trucks to the battle line, he did so too, braving the gunfire and the shouting. He was helpful enough that when he got bored or tired, his comrades coaxed him back into action with snacks.

The Allies won the battle, and word of their ursine warrior stretched far and wide. The 22nd Company drew up new regalia featuring Wotjek, in silhouette, carrying a shell. As historian Aileen Orr puts it in her excellent book about Wojtek, the bear "had pretty much become a legend in his own not inconsiderable lunchtime.”

Wojtek wrestles with the troops during his first tour of duty in 1942. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

 He may have let it go to his head a bit, and for him, the rest of the Italian campaign was a series of capers: he tried to hunt horses and donkeys, danced on top of at least one roadside crane, and scared so many people swimming on the Adriatic Coast that Orr calls him "the furry Jaws of his time." His postwar life was similarly impish. When the fighting ended, Wojtek and many of his fellows ended up at the Winfield Camp for Displaced Persons in Scotland, where he quickly became a local celebrity, and a comfort to yet more displaced people. “They were stateless, homeless, and penniless; the only things they owned were a few meagre possessions in a bag—and a bear,” Orr writes. His campmates showed their love by building Wojtek a swimming pool and taking him on field trips to local dances, where he lolled near the baked goods tables and listened to the fiddles, which calmed him. Even there, in the grip of intense rationing, "he had two bottles of beer a day," and all the food he needed, says veteran Jock Pringle. Wojtek in turn showed his appreciation by being a chick magnet at said dances, and by helping those veterans who had found work as farm laborers to carry fenceposts through the Scottish fields.

Wojtek enjoying Winfield Camp in 1945. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

Slowly, Wojtek's fellow soldiers became less displaced, settling more permanently in Scotland or setting off for other shores. But for Wojtek, the camp was home, and the soldiers were his family. He had not the faintest idea of how to be a wild bear—pretending otherwise would have gotten him attacked by his own species or shot by his adopted one—and life in Soviet-occupied Poland wasn't even that great for people, let alone larger mammals. With great regret, Prendys made arrangements to send Wojtek to the Edinburgh Zoo. The bear drooped in captivity, but he did get a lot of visitors, and they knew what he liked. For the rest of his days, his campmates came by to see their friend, cooing at him in Polish, tossing him candy and lit cigarettes, and, sometimes, jumping into the cage to wrestle. 

Wojtek died in the zoo in December 1963. But to this day, his memory helps the soldiers he served with, giving them an entry point to talk about the war with those who didn't experience it. The bear's continued service is borne out by the many memorials to him scattered throughout different countries. One, a statue that started going up this past weekend, depicts Wojtek and Prendys walking together, the man's hand on the bear's shoulder. They look like a steelier Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin, making their way not into some idealized forest, but through the messy, border-tangled world we all live in instead.

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

"Ever since I’ve got the Taxi Fabric, all my friends want one and the passengers can’t stop asking me about it,” said driver Dashrath Sawant, pictured here with "City of Objects," designed by Sam Kulavoor. (Photo: Taxi Fabric)

If you’re in Mumbai and you happen to hail the right taxi, get ready to be enveloped in a swirl of carefully crafted colors and images. These original seat covers are the brainchild of Taxi Fabric, a collaboration founded in April 2015. So far, Taxi Fabric has outfitted 12 Mumbai taxis, with the fabric designs extending all along the doors and ceilings, and wrapping the entire interior. It’s almost like sitting inside a mural.

Each design features the artist’s own style–some taking the form of block prints or floral patterns, others decorated with hardware supplies or Hindu goddesses. One taxi’s ceiling is reminiscent of the Sistine Chapel, though the men in the clouds are sporting mustaches and riding tigers. Another taxi seat is wrapped in fabric depicting a girl sitting in a window, while a brain floats peacefully below in a rowboat.

Artist Kunel Gaur, who designed this piece, "A Century of Revolt," was inspired by India's century-long struggle for freedom. (Photo: Taxi Fabric)

The designs display a blend of contemporary and historical, edgy and traditional. “Taxi drivers themselves are like peacocks; each driver is trying to outshine his rivals with a more attractive taxi,” the Taxi Fabric founders explain on their Facebook page. They see the fabrics as a way for drivers to spread their feathers and a platform for young designers to share their art, tell stories, and spur conversation. The names of the design and its artist are stitched into each taxi.

Interested designers can submit a portfolio and design concept inspired by Mumbai for selection, or they can self-finance their composition. Taxi Fabric recently raised over $17,000 (11,000 pounds) on Kickstarter and is hoping to continue expanding to taxis all across the city.

With around 55,000 taxis in Mumbai, that means only 54,988 to go! 

"Monad," by Pakistani artist Samya Arif, explores the commonalities and differences between Indians and Pakistanis. (Photo: Taxi Fabric)

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The sitting area at the front of the store. (Photo: Mike Persons/Courtesy Booksmith) 

The Alabama Booksmith is admittedly hard to find. It keeps few titles on its shelves. There is no coffee shop on the premises, no magazine rack or children's book plush toy tie-ins. Yet, this place boasts of booming business and rabid fans, thanks to one special feature: every copy of every one of its books has been signed by the author. 

According to its owner, this bookstore is the only one in the world to make that claim.

George Saunders. Neil Gaiman. Kazuo Ishiguro. Their scrawls pepper the interior pages of Alabama Booksmith’s offerings, all hardcovers, mostly first editions of recent releases by recognizable writers. It’s Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium for a special breed of lit nerd hoarder.

The building itself looks like either a very large trailer or a very small warehouse. It’s easy to spot but hard to find; it sits off a major road, but offers no direct access from it. Instead, you have to wind uncertainly past veterinary clinic, up to an (unrelated) doggie day care, turn left, and chug up one final hill before you land in its small parking lot.

“We’re a dead end street off a dead end street,” says owner Jacob Reiss.

Signed by Harper Lee.  (Photo: Mike Persons/Courtesy Booksmith)

The remote location is intentional, or at least, at the time of its construction, necessary. “We lost our lease in 1999 and had a couple of months to find our location,” says Reiss. A friend in the real estate business referred him to a parcel in his price range. It had been empty for over six months for a reason—or, rather, reasons— as both the roof and the floor were “falling in.” “Every friend, every family member advised against it. But I had to do something, or close down,” he says, We found this out of desperation, but we owned it.” 

The location has been renovated a few times over since then; the roof and floor are sturdy, and a small warehouse area has been added to accommodate the shipping business. The size and signatures aren’t Alabama Booksmith’s only striking aspects. When you finally do arrive and enter, you notice two unusual things. First, all of the books are displayed “front out,” meaning you see all covers and no spines. This limits the amount of inventory Reiss can carry thanks to various laws of geometry and physics. That’s fine by Reiss, who prefers to sell more copies of fewer, carefully chosen books.   

A custom-made floor mat at the entrance to Booksmith.  (Photo: Mike Persons/Courtesy Booksmith)

“If a book is not important to us, we don’t buy it,” says Reiss. “When we select a book, we’re as strong in depth with that title as any chain of stores.” There are also no interior shelves so book covers line the walls with plenty of space to roam, making Alabama Booksmith feel more like a boutique art gallery than a mini-Barnes & Noble.

The other thing you might notice is that all of these books, save for a single shelf of particularly valuable rarities, sell for exactly the cover price. This, despite several of the titles being worth quite a bit more than that already. A signed first edition of Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King, for instance, which Alabama Booksmith still has in stock, already goes for twice its list price on resellers like Abebooks.com. Reiss, obviously, is aware of this, and sees it less as leaving money on the table than as the key to earning repeat business. 

The "front out" display at Alabama Booksmith.  (Photo: Mike Persons/Courtesy Booksmith) 

“We’re not averse to getting more money,” says Reiss, “We’d love to… But at what point does the additional dollar or two or five or ten deter you from buying your first book?”

It’s a philosophy that seems to have paid off. Reiss has been in the book business for 25 years, though this current signature-centric incarnation has been a relatively recent development. “We’ve reinvented ourselves many times in the quarter century we’ve been at it,” Reiss recalls. “When we originally opened we were all used and rare books… We had signed books from the time we opened, but it was no big deal. As we progressed in the business we found that our signed books were selling at a much higher rate than our unsigned books.”

A signed Philip Roth title.  (Photo: Mike Persons/Courtesy Booksmith) 

If you’ve heard of Alabama Booksmith before, it’s likely for a project that Reiss began about a decade ago, the Signed First Editions Club. Its membership numbers in the hundreds, authorial autograph hounds who receive a select signed, new-release title shipped to their doorstep each month. Some titles never gain in value, while others skyrocket; last year’s haul, for instance, included Anthony Doerr’s All the Light You Cannot See, a pristine signed first edition of which can already fetch over $400. Reiss estimates that the club accounts for as much as 85 percent of the store’s revenue. Which raises the question: at a certain point, given the overhead involved, why have a store at all?

Books on display at Alabama Booksmith are alphabetical by author, but there are also tables with genres, like literature.  (Photo: Mike Persons/Courtesy Booksmith)

There are practical reasons, starting with the convenient fact that Reiss owns the land his store sits on, and so doesn’t face the threat of rising rents. It’s also helpful to have a welcoming space to hold events for visiting authors, and warehouse to store overflow and outward-bound titles.  

Mostly, though, it’s still just good business. “You’ll see us going online only when you see pigs flying by that window,” says Reiss. “A goodly number of our solid, great customers discovered us by just accidentally wandering in.” No wonder; for that specialized obsessive, it’s like accidentally wandering into A Window on Eternity. That book, by E.O. Wilson, has a signed first edition available on Abebooks for $120. It’s at Alabama Booksmith for $30.

A recent study estimated that there are around 3 trillion trees currently on earth.

This is down by about 46 percent over the last 12,000 years as human populations have expanded. Three trillion is still a lot of trees, though. Among those three trillion trees are a very small handful of celebrities—trees famous for their very old age or their great size or, as the case of the last tree of Ténéré, their tenacity to survive. And that's not even the weirdest one!

The last tree of Ténéré's brother from another arboreal mother is the Tree of Life in Bahrain. Also known as the Sharajat-al-Hayat or Tree of Life it has stood as the only tree in a remote and harsh desert environment for over 400 years. Said to survive without a water source it is seen as miraculous. The tree has been sited as the location of the Garden of Eden.

Desert leading to the Tree of Life. (Photo: Harold Laudeus/Flickr)

It's not the only tree with a claim on the garden of Eden. In the Iraqi city of Qurna, is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is claimed to be THE tree that Eve plucked the fated apple from. Though now dead, it does not appear to have been an apple tree in life. (God works in mysterious ways.)  

In another apparent miracle in Buford, Wyoming a tree has sprouted from a rock. The tree was discovered by railroad workers in 1860. One hundred and fifty years later it's still there,  in the median between road lanes, surrounded by a small fence, growing stubbornly out of the middle of a large boulder. It now boasts a historical plaque. 

The Bialbero di Casorzo (Photo: Alfio cioffi / Wikimedia)

Trees can grow in a number of odd places, including on other trees. The Bialbero Di Casorzo is one such tree. A fully grown cherry tree growing on top of a fully grown mulberry tree, it too has been given a small fence in its honor. In Atlanta, Georgia there is the Tree That Owns Itself, perhaps the only tree in the world with it's own legal rights. In Belgium there is the well known "tree that Caesar tied his horse to" that Caesar almost certainly didn't tie his horse to,  

Of course there are also actual "last trees."  Found on a hill called the Piton Grand Bass, in the cloud forest of the island of Mauritius, are the last two Bois Dentelle trees which are exactly what they sound like. Wavering on the very edge of extinction, the trees have since been saved and a nursery to grow more Bois Dentelle trees has been established. 

The Burmis Tree (Photo: Monsieur david / Wikipedia)

Finally there are the trees that were just too beloved in life to give up on in death. The last tree of Ténéré was dutifully moved to the National Museum of Niger where its dead trunk stands in it's own small enclosure. Same for the Burmis Tree in Alberta, Canada. The Burmis tree died in 1978, the final symbol of a mining town that had died long before. Instead of turning into firewood, the town has been lovingly caring for the dead trunk since. The tree was blown over in a storm in 1998 and promptly place back up with new supports to keep it standing. In 2004 someone sawed off one of its branches. The branch was recovered, reattached with glue and and given a crutch to support itself.

Tree love transcends tree death.  

The Underground Cavern Suite. (Photo: Courtesy Grand Canyon Caverns) 

 Usually, the word “cavernous” wouldn’t be the highest praise you could pay a hotel room—adjectives like “cozy” or “luxurious” excite hospitality professionals more. But in the case of the Cavern Suite, it’s not only a compliment, it’s accurate.

The accommodations are located 200 feet below ground in the Grand Canyon Caverns in Peach Springs, AZ and billed as “the oldest, darkest, deepest, quietest, and largest suite room in the world.”

In 1927 a woodcutter named Walter Peck either nearly fell or did fall (accounts differ on Peck’s degree of clumsiness) into a hole that opened into the cavern network, which is about 50 miles from the Grand Canyon, to which it is connected. They are the largest dry caverns in the United States, which means they contain no water and thus lack the stalagmites and stalactites that are formed by dripping water in other caverns.

The entrance to Grand Canyon Caverns. (Photo: Lauri Väin/flickr)

According to popular history, Peck hoped that the sparkly walls were filled with gold and he quickly bought the property, only to discover that no such riches were there. But being the entrepreneurial sort, Peck started charging visitors to venture down into the caverns, kicking off its life as a tourist attraction. The caverns have changed hands and names over the years—they’ve been called the Yampai Caverns, the Coconino Caverns and the Dinosaur Caverns. Today they belong to a group of friends who purchased the property in 2001. Located on what was once Route 66, the caverns feature an RV Park, a restaurant, and even a frisbee golf course. Dinosaur statues roam the grounds above the cavern.

The Cavern Suite was dreamed up by the current owners, and was built in 2010, taking about four months to complete. After riding an elevator 22 stories down into the ground, guests emerge into a cavern that is 220 feet by 400 feet, with a 70-foot ceiling. The “room” is tucked into a corner of the cavern, but otherwise is not a room at all, enclosed only by a short, wooden fence that gives it the appearance of a courtroom. For the novelty of staying in the suite, guests pay $800 for the first two guests, and $100 for each additional guest up to six people. The venture has been very successful—the room is booked around 200 days a year.

"One of the 10 most unusual places in the world to sleep"...a sign advertising the Cave Room. (Photo: Courtesy Grand Canyon Caverns)

“It has two queen beds, the couch folds out to a king size bed, there’s a kitchenette with a microwave, fridge and a Keurig,” says Gilbert Casados, who is the head of tour guides at the caverns.

The room has lights, hot and cold water for a shower and a restroom that is good for about “seven to eight flushes.” An attendant sleeps above ground and can be reached at all hours with a walkie-talkie. Guests can control the subterranean elevator and come and go as they please. Adventurous visitors can use flashlights to explore the cavern on their own. There is a record player, a DVD player and a VHS player.

Deep underground. (Photo: Courtesy Grand Canyon Caverns) 

“We provide you with a TV and we only give you two movies to watch,” says Casados. “The Cave and The Descent.”

In The Cave archeologists are tormented by a massive monster in a cave system. In The Descent a group of female spelunkers are tormented by flesh-eating humanoids in a cave system.

“No, I’m just kidding, that’s a joke!,” Casados clarifies. 

The sitting area of the Cavern Suite. (Photo: Courtesy Grand Canyon Caverns) 

While they actually do include those cavern-themed horror films in their library (Casados say guests do sometimes watch those and often regret it) visitors can also choose from family-pleasers such as Back to the Future and Indiana Jones, or an Alfred Hitchcock collection.

Watching Marty McFly pilot his DeLorean from a couch located several hundred feet in the ground is an unusual experience itself, but there are other quirks included in a cavern suite stay. For instance, the tours do not stop and they do pass by the suite. Depending on the time of day guests check in, they may encounter four or five tour groups from the comfort of their open air room. And there’s no need to arrange a wake-up call; groups start passing through at 9 a.m. Casados says some guests are happy to interact with tour groups; others are more bashful. And while the lack of water means that the cavern is not home to animals, it is rumored that the ghosts of long-dead workers and explorers haunt the space.

The caverns were used as a fallout shelter in the 1960s. (Photo: Lauri Väin/flickr)

Casados says the typical guests are families who stay a single night, although they have also entertained film and TV crews and, once, the Scottish actor Billy Connolly.

Over the years, the caverns have been used for various purposes. During the Cuban Missile Crises, the site was identified as a suitable fallout shelter and food and provisions for 200 people were stored in the cavern. The supplies were never fished out and are still down there. The remains of a mummified bobcat (“Bob the Bobcat”) have also been discovered, as well as the skeleton of a prehistoric giant sloth (“Gertie”), who left gash marks in the wall where it tried to climb out.

The mummified bobcat at at the Grand Canyon Caverns. (Photo: Jeremy Miles/flickr)

Casados sometimes finds evidence of those who came before him as he traverses the network of caverns. He’s come across old flashbulbs, and a vintage Babe Ruth candy bar wrapper with a ten cent price tag still affixed. The caverns first explorers weren’t overly concerned with tidiness, according to Casados.

“Now it's not trash,” he says “Now we put it in a display case to show it off.”

The world's longest pinball game was just played on a Twilight Zone machine. (Photo: Carsten Frenzi/Flickr) 

British Columbia resident Eden Stamm just broke the Guinness World Record for the longest consecutive pinball game ever played. Clocking in at 28 consecutive hours of pinging, dinging, and bouncing balls, Stamm blew through the former record at his local pub, the Lamplighter. 

Playing on a Twilight Zone-themed machine, Stamm not only conquered the existing record, but went on to play for hours after, just to make his achievement that much harder to beat. He was able to take breaks of up to five minutes each hour, but could bank that time for longer chunks, which he mainly used for interviews and stretches. The feat was recorded in a video by the Vancouver Sun.

Image: Vancouver Sun/Screencap by Eric Grundhauser

His pinball wizardry didn't come without a cost, though. During his epic game the pinball machine actually broke down twice, according to GlobalNews.ca. Thankfully, Stamm’s crack team of supporters were able to swap out the game with a backup, while the original was fixed.

As for the toll a pinball game lasting more than a day can take on the human body, Stamm said that, surprisingly, his hands were more sore than his back. It took a lot of Advil and a singular dedication to the lure of a bygone game, but today the world has a new champion.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

A modern Neapolitan pizzaioli tends an old-fashioned Neapolitan pizza oven. (Photo: Glenn MacLarty/Flickr)

Humans have basically always loved pizza. The ancient Egyptians ate flatbread with toppings. The 5th century Greek historian Herodotus archived a few good recipes, and the soldiers of the First Persian Empire built cheese-and-date personal pies on their shields, and left them to bake in the sun. These days, American pizza alone is a $35 billion industry. And purveyors of the traditional Neapolitan pizza have a unique preparation method that hasn't changed in hundreds of years.

They battle every day with an ancient technology—the tempestuous, scorching-hot, almost-always-on wood-fired pizza oven. 

According to the experts at Forno Bravo, it was the Romans who perfected the “modern” pizza oven, with its brick walls, tile floor, domed chamber, and arched front door. (We also haven’t diverged much from ancient Roman pizza shop design, which included granite counters, salad bars, and drink stations.) When the fire is stoked, this type of oven heats the pizza on all sides, which means a quick cooking time that sears the outside and nukes the toppings, but leaves the inside nice and doughy. 

A wood-burning oven excavated from ancient Pompeii. (Photo: Polykarbon/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Though some historians disagree, most pizza experts place the birthplace of modern pizza in Naples. Beginning in the 16th century, that city's peasants and “careless youth" snacked on flatbread slathered with sauce and cheese and studded with anchovies and garlic cloves. These pizzas were often sold by street vendors called pizzaioli, who baked their pies in central locations that had the dough and space for a big oven—like Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba, widely considered the first pizzeria, and still slinging crusts today. In a familiar progression, what was once a working class staple gained patrician cachet thanks to hungry travelers, and soon royalty was in on the game. According to Carol Helstosky’s Pizza: A Global History, Ferdinand IV, who reigned over Naples from 1751 to 1825,  had a pizza oven installed in the garden of his summer palace, after which many lesser aristocrats followed suit.

Soon after, immigrants from Naples began replicating their favorite foods in the U.S.. Styles diverged—think of  Chicago deep dish, pineapple, and Kit Kats—the traditional Neapolitan pie, fired in the traditional Neapolitan way, remained. The nonprofit "Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana," or “True Neapolitan Pizza Association,” has dedicated itself to “promoting and defending” the subspecies by handing out official designations, like some sort of saucy mafia.

This handcrafted pizza oven in Amsterdam looks like a fire-eyed stormtrooper. (Photo: Holysloot22/WikiCommons CC0 1.0) 

Achieving perfection requires good ingredients, careful preparation—and replicating Italy-worthy cooking conditions, something many pizza chefs are almost pathologically committed to. Just as a regular chef might bring her favorite knife set along from job to job, a truly dedicated pizzaiolo often brings his oven. The first (documented) commercial pizza oven in America, which the New York Times calls a “magnificent conglomeration of black-and-white enameled bricks on the outside and terra cotta bricks on the inside,” was first fired in 1905. It belonged, and still belongs, to Lombardi’s Pizza, which trucked it from 53 ½ to 32 Spring Street when they moved down the block in 1994. In the same Times profile, written in 1956, Gennaro “Don” Lombardi himself “patted the oven and said, ‘this is what made me a man today.’” Decades later, succeeding Lombardi generations have matching bald spots and burn scars from taming the beast.

Pizza shops that haven’t been around for centuries try to keep up in their own ways. Some import the goods straight from Naples, lately often from Stefano Ferrara, a third-generation oven-builder whose handmade wares look like colorful igloos. In 2009, Brooklyn’s Paulie Gee brought in one of the first in the U.S., custom-built by Ferrara so that it could slide right into a shipping container. Between transport, customs, installation, and the oven itself, he paid $25,000 for it. "Considering it is the one thing that I absolutely need in my restaurant, it was a bargain,” he told Eater; a few years later, he flew out Ferrara himself to fix the oven in his new Baltimore location. Cooks at New York's Donatella restaurant refer to their oven as "her," like a ship, while Boulder’s Pizzeria Locale tried to build their own onsite, using a shipment of clay and Vesuvian ash. Customs shut down that plan, so they had one rerouted from Moscow, and now are attempting to develop a futuristic “gas-and-infrared-powered rotational oven” to help with their planned Chipotle-sponsored expansion.

A Neapolitan pizza of the Margherita persuasion. Note the thin crust, char spots, and lack of slices. (Photo: N Wong/Flickr)

Once they get to their destinations, these behemoths need more tending. When asked about care and keeping, Stefano Ferrara installer Michael Fairholme details the “very prescribed five-to-seven-day process” of slow heating necessary to sweat out the 16 liters of water that, if left in, would crack the brick and tiles. After that, chefs can take it up to a thousand degrees—the temperature required to give pies the perfect ratio of smoke, crisp and chewiness—but that process, too, takes time, about two days for an oven revving up from zero. To stay that hot, it must be fed more fuel at least once per hour. Luckily, cooling is also slow, and an oven left alone overnight is still at 450 when everyone comes in to roll the dough the next morning.

This means the world is full of hungry, temperamental fire caves cycling between “hot enough to roast potatoes” and “hot enough to break aluminum”—all to keep those cheesy, crusty discs flying. Prego.

 Qatar Open, Doha. (Photo: Kate/flickr)

These days, most casual tennis fans know the sport by knowing its superstar international players: Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, and Maria Sharapova, among others, are household names, even in countries like the U.S. where tennis is, give or take, only the 6th-most-popular sport.

But there is a strangeness at the heart of the sport that separates it from most other popular athletics in America: there is no one league. Like the New York City subway system, actually a smashed-up combination of several earlier networks, loosely linked together in a desperate effort to make the sport make sense. (It doesn’t entirely succeed.)

For fans, this means that, at any given moment, some of the world’s best players might be competing in a little-known tournament near you.

Wimbledon Championships, 1883. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Competitive tennis took off in the late 19th century, the time period when Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the French Open, three of the biggest four tournaments currently in the world, were established. The Australian Open dates back to 1905. In 1913, the national tennis associations of 15 nations came together to create one worldwide governing body, at first called the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF). (The “lawn” part was later removed.) The ILTF formalized the rules of the sport, declared an official language (French, with an English translation), located the headquarters (Paris), created a team championships (later to be called the Davis Cup, sort of a World Cup of tennis in which players represent their country). Written into the rules was a little gift for England: the world championships on a grass court would be held, forever, in Great Britain.

But the ILTF, like FIFA for soccer, was simply an umbrella organization: leagues sprouted up all around the world, and individual tournaments, and the entire thing turned into chaos.

Rodney Laver at the 1969 Top Tennis Tournament in Amsterdam. (Photo: Evers, Joost/Anefo/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0nl)

The tournaments now known as the Grand Slams were all independent tournaments, and all were only open to amateurs, which sounds bizarre by today’s standards. Tennis was, until 1968, structured sort of like figure skating: The tournaments were for “amateurs,” and once you turned pro, you performed in exhibition matches organized by a league, and could compete in less popular tournaments like the Wembley Championship and the Tournament of Champions. Amateurs who competed at Wimbledon or the U.S. Open were compensated for travel expenses and nothing else. No prize money. Like in college sports, the promoters and stadiums and league officials raked in money on the much-more-popular amateur tournaments, while the players either went penniless or (more often) broke the rules and accepted money to appear. Eventually, they’d turn pro and be forgotten.

Everything changed in 1968, because the Grand Slams opened their doors to professional players. The period after 1968, up to the present, is referred to as the “Open Era.” All of a sudden, there was money to be made in tennis, not just by the promoters and officials but by the players as well. Professional players signed contracts with a few competing leagues, which dictated which tournaments the players would participate in. By 1970, there were two dominant leagues: National League Tennis (NTL) and World Championship Tennis (WCT).

This, too, was chaos, because if one particular league didn’t like one particular tournament, every player would simply not play. In 1968, the WCT’s eight best players didn’t compete in the French Open. In 1970, NTL players boycotted the Australian Open. It would be as if the NBA boycotted the Olympics one year. Who would watch Olympic basketball with nobody from the NBA?

Competition was insane. Leagues banned their players from playing in the world’s most popular events. Third-party leagues sprung up and only added to the confusion. WCT absorbed NTL, which made things simpler but also increased WCT’s bargaining power, which was very bad. Eventually the ILTF, in 1972, flipped out and simply banned all professional contract players from playing in any of the big events, including the 1972 French Open and Wimbledon.

The Chennai Open . (Photo: Ashok Prabhakaran/flickr)

To fix these ridiculous problems, the players took matters into their own hands. In 1972, male players founded the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), basically a union to protect their interests. In 1973, female players, having been left out, formed the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA). This led to the ILTF saying screw it, and combining with the WCT, which lasted for a whopping four years before the WCT separated again. Throughout the 1980s, the WCT operated a smaller tour while the ILTF (by this point simply the ITF) operated the Grand Slams.

Eventually, in 1990, the ATP took over the WCT’s tour, and named it the ATP World Tour, which began with nine tournaments across the world. More importantly, the ATP began doing their own rankings, which the ILTF/ITF was forced to begin using as well.

What this means is that for the world’s top players today, there are near-constant tournaments to play in. Of course you literally can’t (and wouldn’t want to; tennis is a physically demanding sport) play in every tournament, so you pick and choose which ones to compete in. “Nobody plays every single one; sometimes there are two or three a week,” says Joel Drucker, who covers tennis for the Tennis Channel (and pretty much everywhere else). Partly that decision will be made by how healthy the player is, but also largely by points, which make up a player’s overall world ranking.

Djokovic in Dubai. (Photo: Marianne Bevis/flickr)

Each tournament is worth a specific amount of points, and the tournaments are classified into a few tiers based on how many points and how much prize money they offer. The smallest tournaments are classified as the IFT Men’s Circuit Tournaments, which offer, for the winner, only 35 points, and around $10,000 to $15,000 in prize money. (In all the tournaments, those who don’t win still get some points and some money depending on how well they performed.) There are hundreds of these tournaments, all around the country.

The next step up is the ATP Challenger Tour, which gives up to 125 points and around $220,000 in prize money for the victor. Then the ATP World Tour 250 series, the ATP World Tour 500 series, the ATP World Tour Masters 1000 series, and finally, the Grand Slams. (Those numbers refer to the maximum number of points you can get. The Slams are worth 2,000 points for the victor.)

What this means is that, at pretty much any given moment, there is a tournament going on somewhere near you. Most of these aren’t even televised; nobody much cares about a Challenger tournament in Marrakesh or Knoxville or Tianjin. But the 250, 500, and 1000 series routinely host the world’s best players (sometimes they have to pay the players to come, but still) in much smaller and more intimate arenas. If you want to see Roger Federer play Novak Djokovic, the best place to do it isn’t the U.S. Open or even Wimbledon. It might be, like...Cincinnati. Or Rotterdam.

Queen's Club London Double semi-final in 2012, with Novak Djokovic and Jonathan Erlich v Julien Benneteau and Michael Llodra. (Photo: Kate/flickr)

I spoke to a few tennis experts about their favorite tournaments. “Indian Wells [in California’s Coachella Valley] has a great atmosphere, kind of like a spring training. They have all the best players, their venue is significantly more intimate than the Slams, it’s [held in] March, so the players are still quite kind of chilled out, and you can see them up closer,” says Drucker. The players love Indian Wells (except, maybe, for Serena and Venus Williams, who boycotted the event for over a decade) as well as the Queen’s Club Championships in London and the Dubai Tennis Championships, which until recently were delightfully known as the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships.

Fans tend to love the Halle Championships in north-central Germany, a high-tech grass-court tournament that serves as a warmup for Wimbledon. Or you could go for Monte Carlo, overlooking the Mediterranean. Or the neon purple-and-green courts at the Qatar Open, in the desert of Doha. The one that everyone seems to agree is the worst? The China Open, in Beijing, which fans describe as having horrible weather, egregious air pollution, and no love from fans.

The tournaments tend to air on the Tennis Channel, and old matches routinely show up in their entirety on YouTube. But the best thing about these smaller tournaments is exactly that: they’re smaller. Courtside seats at the U.S. Open finals will run you over $8,000, minimum. In Cincinnati, to see the same players? Less than $600.

A modern-day megamouth (Photo: FLMNH Ichthyology/Wikimedia)

100 million years ago, a prehistoric shark swam the shallow waters around what's now Russia. A group of scientists found a collection of this shark's fossilized teeth, and they determined that it had one key characteristic—a terrifyingly large mouth, similar to the giant rift in the face of today's very rare megamouth shark.

In fact, it's so similar that the new shark is called Pseudomegachasma, after the current day megamouth, reports Discovery News. 

This is the kind of mouth that makes one glad that the corresponding shark is long extinct. But this shark was a relatively gentle predator. It only ate plankton.

Sharks have a reputation as cold-blooded meat eaters, but there are a few kinds, even today, that prefer plankton. The modern megamouth is one of them, actually. The basking shark and the whale shark also gorge themselves on tiny, tiny creatures. This extinct shark appears to have evolved independently of today's sharks, though. Apparently a giant shark mouth is just so advantageous that evolution has invented it more than once. 

Bonus find: A strawberry that wants to be a bear

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.