When national museums and galleries were still a relatively new form of public institution, official policies of accessibility and popular education were frequently expressed through a sustained use of metaphor drawn from the discourse of the book. Museums became repositories of knowledge or sources of information on good design, and the visitors readers of objects. Such rhetorical devices could prove counter-productive, for they were based on assumptions, not facts, about the extent of popular literacy and the nature and diversity of reading practices, and yet this form of conceptualisation affected the form, content and quantity of early museum and gallery publications.