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Many of us in these past few generations first heard of the Metropolitan Museum of Art while reading E. L. Konigsburg’s novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. More than a few of us also fantasized about running away to live in that vast cultural institution like the book’s young protagonists Claudia and Jamie Kincaid. Yet among other, more practical concerns, we might have wondered where we were going to secure enough reading material to get us through those long after-hours nights. Konigsburg had Claudia and Jamie visit the former Donnell Library Center, but what about in the Met itself?

What we probably didn’t realize in our youth was that, in addition to being a museum, the Met is a publisher. Now, at the MetPublications digital archive, we can read a great variety of the books, guides, and periodicals it’s put out for more than a century–from a 1911 catalog of the museum’s collection of pottery, porcelain, and faïence (which refers to pottery of the tin-glazed variety) to — as of this writing — the latest issue of the Met’s Bulletin, on Mexican printmakers including Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. They and the more than 1,600 publications that lie between them are free for you to explore, some readable online, and some downloadable in PDF form.

You might find issues of the Bulletin on everything from Frank Lloyd Wright to interwar photography to Korean art, as well as catalogs for exhibitions like AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion, The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry (whose central work of calendrical art was previously featured here on Open Culture), Van Gogh in Arles, The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer, and The Poetry of Nature: Edo Paintings from the Fishbein-Bender Collection. MetPublications offers plenty of interesting reading, but if you find you suddenly have to do some serious art-historical research, you’ll also find that it’s a far more convenient resource than Claudia and Jamie had.

Enter the MetPublications digital archive here, and, once there, particularly explore the “Free to Download” section.

Related content:

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An Unbelievably Detailed, Hand-Drawn Map Lets You Explore the Rich Collections of the Met Museum

A World of Art: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.