This collection by "architectural history's most beguiling essayist" (as Reinhold Martin calls the author in the book's foreword) illuminates the unfamiliar, the arcane, the obscure -- phenomena largely missing from architectural and landscape history. These essays by Edward Eigen do not walk in a straight line, but roam across uncertain territory, discovering sunken forests, unclassifiable islands, inflammable skies, unvisited shores, plagiarized tabernacles. Taken together, these texts offer a group portrait of how certain things fall apart.