The Art Museum

Phaidon's The Art Museum weighs in at 18 pounds, measures 16 1/2 by 12 5/8 inches and runs nearly 1,000 pages.

From a piece on NPR...

The Art Museum is divided into 25 galleries, as opposed to chapters, and each gallery is divided into several rooms, which all told include reproductions of more than 2,700 works.

If this one museum were real, there would hardly be any need for another.

"This is the only place that you can go — the only physical museum that you can go — and find [a] complete overview of art history ... from cave paintings to works made in the last decade," Amanda Renshaw, Phaidon Press' editorial director, tells NPR's Robert Siegel on All Things Considered.

Renshaw also oversaw The Art Museum. The idea for the project began when Phaidon publisher Richard Schlagman suggested imagining a museum with unlimited space and an unlimited budget.

"It didn't matter how famous the works were, how large, how small, how inaccessible to the public," Renshaw says.