Above: Ed Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962

Below: Ed Ruscha, Various Small Fires, 1964

In his first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962), Ruscha exhibits 26 photographs of gasoline stations located along Route 40 between Los Angeles (where he lived) and Oklahoma City (where he grew up). "These images are like 26 letters of a personal alphabet that are structured by the form of the book."⁵⁰ He numbered the first printing of this book, but soon came to realize how by numbering the books he was making a statement that was the opposite of his intent of "making mass produced" objects. With these books he also destroyed the aura of preciousness by printing them two more times, ending up with 3,900 copies in circulation, making his work available to audiences beyond the gallery and museum goer.
         In his next two books, Various Small Fires (1964) and Nine Swimming Pools (1968) Ruscha further displays his sense of humor. When the book is opened words are added to the titles so they become, Various Small Fires and Milk and Nine Swimming Pools and Broken Glass . Both books continue the format of a sequence of photographs, printed in an undistinguished way and are designed to have the look of an "incidental publication."⁵¹ Ruscha's ideas of propagating art work in simple publications soon became very popular in the climate of the 1960s and early 1970s when art took on a more inclusive character.
         In 1976 Printed Matter, a collective bookstore and publisher for the artists book as a mass produced multiple, opened in New York City. It is still in existence today. This same year another institution, Franklin Furnace was founded by Martha Wilson as an archive for a similar type of artist book. Their collection policy was based on creating an archive for the democratic artists books - books with big ideas and small budgets. It was Wilson's belief that other types of artists books, that focused on materials and production, could not focus on a big idea in their content and as she states " ... I'm sort of prejudiced against high-end stuff because while it is big on materials, it is often very short on ideas. ... I don't care about technique - no, none of that stuff impresses me at all. I just care about the idea."⁵² She also believed that other museums were collecting "high-end" artists books and that the Franklin Furnace collection was filling a much needed void. In 1993 the 13,500 titles in the Franklin Furnace collection were sold to the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) for the price of $1 million.⁵³ There they could be included in the museum's database and preservation could more easily be managed. MoMA agreed to maintain the terms of acceptance that were key to Franklin Furnace's whole concept - that they would accept any work that was defined as an artists book by the artist so that the collection could maintain its artist-driven basis.⁵⁴
         In the mid-to-late 1970s the aspect of the artists book as a democratic multiple began to fade, and in effect Ruscha stopped creating books and continued working in other mediums. Interestingly, in Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literatureby Stefan Klima, Ruscha is quoted as saying that his interest was not in the book as a object, but rather in the "mass produced object."⁵⁵ Since the 1970s the emphasis on the "available and cheap" is only minimally apparent in artists books.
         In Speaking of Book Art, Cathy Courtney interviews 15 well-known British and American book artists. All were familiar with Ruscha's work, but only one felt directly influenced by his contribution to artists books. Perhaps his work per se does not influence current book artists, but one cannot ignore the effect that his work had on exposing artists books as a viable medium to the art world.
         It is with Dieter Roth and Ed Ruscha that I leave the historical chapter on the artists book and move into the present day. Many of the artists I cover in the next section partially overlap with this 1960-1970 time period, but for the most part this would be near the beginnings of their careers. Much has changed since these early days, but it seems evident that by the mid-late 20th century artists books were becoming a self-sustaining, even self-defining medium.

 

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