Metropolitan Museum of Art Catalogs

Good morning!

I always look forward to reading my daily email updates from Two Nerdy History Girls (because if you put they and me in a room, you would have THREE nerdy history girls....ah ha ha), and today's update has to be one of the most exciting for all you full-text bibliophiles out there. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has made 370 of their back catalogs available online.... FOR FREE, I SAY. FOR FREE. In age in which even my local newspaper has limited availability online without a subscription, the Met is not asking for a single sou, and my stars, what they're giving us! You can read 'em online...you can download 'em as a pdf...you can print them out... I can feel my head getting light again. Look at the kind of stuff we're talking about, here! I just focused on clothing catalogs, and the things I FOUND:

From Bare Witness: Clothing and Nudity

From Christian Dior

From American Ingenuity: Sportswear, 1930s–1970s

From Our New Clothes: Acquisitions of the 1990's

From The Ceaseless Century: Three Hundred Years of Eighteenth-Century Costume

From Haute Couture

I could actually die from how excited I am about getting to peruse these at length. There's tons more where that came from, and catalogs featuring everything from Revolutionary War era miniature paintings to Africa couple sculptures...what a resource! Go to any of the links or the Met Publications webpage and click on the "titles with full text online" option from the left side bar. Have fun!

Which dress out of my hand-picked favorites would you like to take for a night out on the town? Do you fantasy shop museum pieces as often or more often than you do the sale section of Target.com? Let's talk!

PS If you're interested in looking at more "dresses of antiquity", Mrs. Leapheart told me about the tumblr OMG that dress! and I will say, between that and the Met catalogs, I am not getting annnnnnything done at work today.

That's it for now; see you tomorrow for Photo Friday!