It's all part of the service

One of the most important things that a library can do is provide access to things you might not ordinarily find or purchase for yourself. It might be a cutting-edge novel, or an unusual piece of music, or a frivolous magazine. Beautiful picture books for adults (coffee-table books) are some of the most enjoyable things to select. We have a lovely new one on the shelves: Art of the Classical World in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Greece, Cyprus, Etruria, Rome. Five members of the museum's Department of Greek and Roman Art collaborated on this book (Carlos Picon, Jan Mertens, Sean Hemingway, Christopher Lightfoot and Elizabeth Milleker), while Richard De Puma contributed his expertise on Etruscan art.
The book has page after page of beautiful photos of statuary, frescoes, jewelry, pottery, coins, vessels, and architectural elements. The sections are broken up into geographical and chronological units, with a brief introduction before each section. The photos are well-selected to provide as much detail as possible. Each photo is numbered, with the descriptive information (including maps!) in the last part of the book. On the one hand, it makes a fabulous book for browsing. It is so easy to pore over each page, focusing on the visual information contained in the photo without any text distractions. On the other hand, it's inconvenient to be flipping back and forth between the photo and text sections. You might even be tempted to forgo the textual explanations all together, in which case you would lose a lot of the information. So I guess that my point is that this is a great browse, an awkward read, and a beautiful book.