In 1948, the Metropolitan Museum of Art went into business with the Book-of-the-Month Club to bring art to the wider public. The two institutions collaborated on three projects between 1948 and 1962: 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). While the Met had dedicated itself to public art education since its founding, the projects with the club were new types of ventures, as these very successful mail-order publications went directly into the homes of subscribers.

The Met and the Masses sets 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, this book demonstrates how the Met had to tread carefully in upholding its reputation as an institution of high culture when it brought art to the masses in postwar America.