This friendly, affordable guide to some 1,700 museums with art collections is a perfect resource to hand the art lover who wants to know what museums and other public exhibition spaces to visit in an area. Entries are arranged by state and city, and include basic information about fees, hours, activities, Web sites, and a description of the collections, facilities, a bit of history, and any special points of interest. Handy maps showing museum locations introduce each state section, and inviting photographs accompany most entries.

In Small Wonder: Worlds in a Box, David Levinthal takes as his subject a remarkable series of 1950s playsets manufactured by master toymakers Louis Marx and T. Cohn. As a reflection of the obsessive play of the 1950s and the current nostalgia for such items, Levinthal's tabletop photography allows the reader a bird's-eye view of imaginary tableaux - Legionnaire Captain Gallant in the desert, Fort Apache and the Wild West, boy scouts camping in the woods, and travelers making a stop at a roadside Howard Johnson's. Playset vignettes are like stills from a movie of American popular culture's collective unconscious. In the book's introduction, David Corey explores the history of playsets and their effect on American children in the 1950s.

Things American gives us, at last, a history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art based on genuine archival materials. Moreover, it reorients our thinking about art museums in the United States, demonstrating that there were important democratic, utilitarian, and civic impulses at work behind them.