This book explores the collaborations, during the mid-20th century, between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Between 1948 and 1962 the two institutions collaborated on three book projects-The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures (1948-1957), The Metropolitan Seminars in Art (1958-60), and a print reproduction of Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1962)-bringing art from the Met's collections right into the homes of subscribers. The Met and the Masses places these commercial enterprises in a variety of contemporary and historical contexts, including the relation of cultural education to democracy in America, the history of the Met as an educational institution, the rise of art education in postwar America, and the concurrent transformation of the home into a space that mediated familial privacy and the public sphere. Using never before published archival material, the book demonstrates how the Met sought to bring art to the masses in postwar America, whilst upholding its reputation as an institution of high culture. It is essential reading for scholars, researchers and curators interested in the history of modern art, museum and curatorial studies, arts and cultural management, heritage studies, as well as the history of art publications.

"TO HELL WITH THE LAW" LYNCHING has many legal definitions. It means one thing in Kentucky and North Carolina and another in Virginia or Minnesota. For the purpose of this work it is defined as the execution without process of the law, by a mob, of any individual suspected or convicted of a crime or accused of an offense against the prevailing social customs. The state of Minnesota clearly defines it as the killing of a human being by the act or procurement of a mob. In Kentucky and North Carolina the lynch-victim must have been in the hands of the law or there was no lynching. Virginia defines it simply as murder and ordains that every person composing the mob, upon conviction, shall be punished by death. There is more than the simple dictionary definition of lynching. Behind every lynching, beyond the destruction of the unfortunate victim, is the debasement of citizenship, the crucifixion of justice and democratic government, the prostitution of public officials, and the depraved behavior of the mob-members. FRANK SHAY, 1938