Bob Eckstein Has the Perfect Museum for You

“When they first go to museums, the first two things people want to know is, where’s the gift shop and where’s the bathroom?” said the writer and illustrator Bob Eckstein, 61, whose new book, “Footnotes From the Most Fascinating Museums,” is an illustrated field guide to North America’s cultural and historical repositories.

He envisions families using it as their “summer vacation bucket list” to discover the riches available at institutions as various as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Hollywood Cars Museum in Las Vegas (home of a General Lee from “The Dukes of Hazzard”) and the Wenham Museum in Massachusetts, where the collection includes 1,000 dolls and more than 600 mechanical toys dating to 1780.

A born New Yorker who lives not far from the Met Cloisters in Upper Manhattan, Mr. Eckstein started with a hit list of 150 museums that was eventually whittled to the 75 that appear in the book. He spent a little over a year visiting the institutions to photograph and sketch them and collect stories from curators, guides and visitors.

His illustrations capture the feeling of walking through galleries or pausing to consider an artwork like “Watson and the Shark,” by John Singleton Copley, from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (his wife, the artist Tamar Stone, is the woman reading the wall label to the painting’s right). While working on the book, Mr. Eckstein said, “I would take photographs, I would do a little bit of sketching and then I would do the illustrations back in my studio and try to make the museum as sexy, as exciting as could be.”