The Great Reveal

Catherine Petersen calls “The Great Reveal” a book club, but it’s not like any book club Northwest Arkansas has seen before.

Beginning Monday, the book club will meet five times in 2013, introducing patrons at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to some of the 60,000 items Petersen oversees in the library. Some of them are books so rare they’re kept on secure shelves.

Others are exhibition catalogs or ephemera - letters, manuscripts, even signatures of artists whose work is included in the Crystal Bridges collection.

“I’m going to pull out things that are kind of behind the scenes,” says Petersen, who is the library director. “We’ll bring them out with the white gloves, let folks see them and talk about how curators use them to get background for exhibits. We have a very diverse collection.”

Petersen, who joined the Crystal Bridges staff in 2010, has a master’s degree in art history with an emphasis in American art and a second master’s degree in library science. The job was a perfect fit, she says, not just because of the opportunity but because of its proximity to her hometown, Kansas City. Having canoed in Arkansas in the 1970s, she also knew the beauty of the region, she says.

She’s still getting to know the collection she administers, however. Between her employment and the opening of Crystal Bridges on Nov.

11, 2011, she and the staff scrambled to get as many items as possible catalogued and on the shelves. Some 25,000 still await organization, she says, but she does have her favorite among the items she has gottento know. It’s a book from the 1760s, the work of Mark Catesby, a British naturalist who came to the Carolinas to document the flora of the area and collect seeds to send back to England so wealthy manor owners could have the same plants.

“I’m particularly fond of the Mark Catesby because it was an acquisition approved last year at this time,” Petersen says. “I discovered it at auction and thought it would be an excellent addition to the colorplate collection.”

Perhaps the most significant part of the colorplate library - which simply means fullcolor illustrations - is a single collection acquired in 2006.

Included, Petersen says, are books on birds and botanicals, surgical books used in the Civil War, Victorian gift books for women created with color illustrations and poems or other musings, geological surveys of the United States - material, Petersen says, that will interest all sorts of scholars. It is so diverse, she says, that she can draw from it for The Great Reveal for years to come.

The first installment of the book club will focus on parts of the library collection related to the current exhibit “Art UnderPressure.” The 38 images are part of a collection of 468 early 20th century prints put together by one collector andacquired by Crystal Bridges earlier this year. Kevin Murphy, curator of American art for the museum, says all of the printsin the collection comment on life among the working class, working conditions and even environmental issues.

Petersen plans to focus her talk on three artists - Joseph Pennell, Rockwell Kent and Thomas Hart Benton - and will display a 1930 edition of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” illustrated by Kent, whose bold art deco prints significantly influenced the advertising of his time. The special edition of “Moby Dick,” released in an aluminum slipcase, was limited to 1,000 copies, one of which resides in the Crystal Bridges library.

Petersen says getting the library organized has been a “gigantic” challenge, but The Great Reveal is part of her reward.

“I love to be able to talk about the things I get to see.”