Bob Eckstein Has the Perfect Museum for You

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.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

“Sexy” and “exciting” might not be everyone’s first descriptions of museums.

I get so exhilarated going to museums and I was not a museum person, let’s say, 20 years ago. I went to museums, but now I’m obsessed with museums. I get so excited to see what I’m going to see. I saw more artwork in the last two years than most people see in a lifetime. My head is filled with inspiration.

As a traveler, when you go to a city, do you always go to museums?

It is one of the things I’ll do, yes. One of the first things I’ll check out is what’s going on in the way of exhibits and shows to make sure that there’s nothing I’m going to miss.

Have you ever discovered a museum that you really fell in love with?

For the book, I went to Los Angeles with a list of museums that I wanted to check out, unaware that there was this one museum called the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and that became my favorite museum. I can’t say much about it except to say that it’s a total mystery and if I share any more it might ruin the experience for someone else. It’s one of the most mind-boggling museums I went to. I like to say it’s like the Andy Kaufman of museums.

There’s certainly a wide variety of museums in the book, from the Museum of Bad Art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. How did those get on the list?

There were many factors that made a museum make the cut. One of them would be simply entertainment value, making sure that there was a museum for everyone and understanding that not everyone’s going to have a taste for fine art. I wanted to…