Metropolitan Museum of Art's New Guidebook The Metropolitan Museum of Art Enticements from the new Met guide: "Hypocrite and Slanderer," above; "Kneeling Bull Holding a Spouted Vessel," right; and "Aquamanile Depicting Aristotle and Phyllis." Not all books have outlived their usefulness, but some have. The strictly informational kind, for example: does anyone buy dictionaries and encyclopedias in hard-copy form anymore? There was a run on the Encylopaedia Britannica after plans to cease printing paper editions were announced last month, but surely that had more to do with nostalgia than research needs. You may think that guidebooks put out by museums to highlight their most prized possessions should be on the endangered list too. Or maybe not. Consider a new one for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Equipped with a soft but durable cover and about the dimensions of a middleweight novel, "The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide" (distributed by Yale University Press, $24.95) displays in 449 pages images and brief descriptions of 600 of the Met's nearly two million works. The first new edition in almost 30 years, it has a more appealing design than the old one, whose narrow dimensions and almost marginless pages jam-packed with reproductions and text gave it the feel of a mail-order catalog. How useful the new guide will be when anything you want to know about the Met and its holdings can be quickly accessed on the museum's world-class Web site is an interesting question. People who have never been to the Met stand to profit most. It is a bewildering place, and unless you are going to see a specific exhibition, it is easy to feel lost at sea there. A conscientious user of the guide could conceivably get a pretty good overview of the whole place in a few days and not have to worry about missing anything major. Rembrandt, Vermeer, "Washington Crossing the Delaware," Monet, van Gogh - all the Western world's favorites are represented. It is also a good tool for navigating the perhaps less-familiar waters of the ancient arts of Egypt, Greece, Rome and Asia, and the more recent but more foreign-seeming productions of Africa, South America and Oceania. Musical instruments, arms and armor, photography, drawings and prints, costumes and modern and contemporary art: every department is represented. Teachers of any grade level could use the guide as an introduction to art of the whole world from the last 6,000 years. On the other hand, people who have been to the museum more times than they can remember and have explored all its nooks and crannies might suppose they won't need it. But they may well enjoy noting what the Met's departmental curators think should be carried out first in case of fire and arguing about the selections: Why this and not that? A point of contention could be the image on the front cover, a profile portrait of a beautiful black man in a salmon-hued satin tunic and a complicated, colorful turban with multitudes of little dangling tassels, painted by the French academician Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1868-9. It is called "Bashi-Bazouk," a Turkish name for certain mercenary soldiers of the time. It is a curious choice for the cover, an Orientalist fantasy by an artist who never got much respect from modern scholars. Gérôme, as it happens, is absent from the previous guide. The semiotic implications are rich: Is this what art is for the West: Exotic, erotic, lawless? Other? A respite from America's Puritanical heritage? On the cover the painting is cropped so you cannot see that this sexy warrior has the barrel of a musket over one shoulder and pistols cradled in one arm. Yikes! call Homeland Security. What, I wonder, were the editors thinking? I assumed at first that I would have little use for the guide. Perusing its pages, however, I found lots of things I wanted to see in the flesh, either again or for the first time. I am sure that I have seen Andrea Mantegna's "Adoration of the Shepherds," but now I want to go back for another look at this compact, intensely detailed painting dating from shortly after 1450. Nicolas Poussin's weird "Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun," in which a giant with a little man standing on his shoulders strides through an Arcadian landscape, is another I plan to check out. Other items on my list: "Kneeling Bull Holding a Spouted Vessel," a 6‹-inch-tall silver sculpture of an anthropomorphic animal made in what is now southwestern Iran around 3100-2900 B.C; from the Lehman Collection, a 14th-century aquamanile - a vessel for ritual hand washing - in the comical form of Aristotle on hands and knees being ridden by his seducer Phyllis; and, in European sculpture, Franz Xavier Messerschmidt's "Hypocrite and Slanderer" from 1770-83, a tin-alloy portrait head of a man consumed by unpleasant thoughts. But then I wonder: Will the objects I want to find be on view? One that caught my eye, "Statuette of the God Amun," a solid-gold Egyptian figure that is not quite seven inches tall but weighs two pounds, is not currently on display, according to the museum's Web site. For those that are, where are they? The guide has no map. This is understandable: Objects rotate in and out of storage or travel to other museums" exhibitions; installations, floor plans and architecture are likely to change too. The guide must leave out time-dependent specifics if it is not going to be updated every year or so. In a way that is the beauty of it: Uncluttered by excess information, it delivers its essence with streamlined efficiency. There will be other ways to find what you need to know. Imagine a downloadable and updatable guide for handheld devices, with maps locating every object. GPS functions could lead viewers exactly where they want to go. Every object would be linked to the museum's database, where much more information is available than can be found on wall labels. Inevitably the museum will have such a guide and lend or rent such devices to visitors who don't already have them, and the galleries will be filled with people staring intently at their little screens and intermittently glancing up at the art. But then the question of access rears its ugly head. Not everyone has a hand-held, app-loaded device. Meanwhile the Met's guide will be as useful as its users care to make it.