Books as museums

On his blog about children's nonfiction, Marc Aronson has an interesting post comparing older children's nonfiction to a documentary. I've often thought of children's nonfiction as a museum--a combination of words and visuals, sometimes more narrative, sometimes more browseable. As Holling Clancy Holling (author/illustrator of Paddle-to-the-Sea and other epics about American history, geography, and natural history) writes in Minn of the Mississippi:

“A natural history museum is simply a roofed group of four big boxes holding specimens. These four ‘departments’ with ‘divisions’ hold four kinds of things—specimens of our ‘Earth’—its plants—its animal life—and its people.”

Loosely speaking, I think he's made a good description of his own books.