Twentysix Gasoline Stations by Ruscha (13 results)

First edition, number 209 of 400. Unpaginated, pp [48]. Original printed wrappers and with the original (and rare) glassine wrapper. Some slight spotting to edges of covers and a short blue biro mark to glassine on lower cover and a small spot on upper cover but overall in very good condition and Toning to edges and spine, crease to lower cover, head and foot of spine very slight chipped but overall in very good condition. Internally near fine. Twentysix Gasoline Stations is Ruscha's first book and widely regarded as the first modern artist's books. It consists simply of black and white photographs and brief captions stating the name of the petrol company and location of the station. The book's origins lie in Ruscha's long drives from California to his parents' home in Oklahoma. It sounds dull and it is meant to be, combining as Johanna Drucker says, "the literalness of early California pop art with a flat-footed photographic aesthetic informed by minimalist notions of repetitive sequence and seriality". Ruscha himself explained how he wanted "absolutely neutral material. My pictures are not that interesting.my book is more like a collection of readymades". He wanted, he said, "to be the Henry Ford of book making". This car imagery, combined with the gasoline stations have led some to see the book as a photographic version of a road movie - and Ruscha certainly draws on the gas station's central place in American popular culture. But Ruscha, brought up a Catholic, has lent his support to a more serious reading which sees his journey home through these stations as a form of religious journey, a modern, secular Stations of the Cross: "there is a connection between my work and my experience with religious icons". This sense of a pilgrimage with a defined endpoint is reinforced by Ruscha's decision to use as his last image a gasoline station owned by Fina.

Softcover. Condition: Fine. First Edition. Glossy printed plain white wraps with original glassine jacket. 5.55" x 7.05" An extraordinary copy of the first of Ruscha's iconic publications, in pristine condition. The glassine jacket is all original and virtually unscathed, with the exception being a Lilliputian hole along the spine edge between the top and middle lines of text. The jacket exhibits some minor age-toning and offsetting from where this book set within a pile of two other Ruscha books for some period of time as if in a display.From what can be pieced together, this book was part of a group which was likely sent to a New York Art Book store as part of a marketing campaign to sell the books, which originally did not sell well for Ruscha. This is a first edition. TWENTYSIX GASOLINE STATIONS is dated 1962 on the title-page, and is an unnumbered copy of 400 copies printed in April 1963 by The Cunningham Press. An extraordinary copy.

Softcover. Condition: Poor. First Edition. [externally in pretty bad shape (see images and notes), with part of the front cover torn (or eaten) away, and general overall soiling and discoloration; the binding, however, is intact, and the internals are perfectly OK]. (B&W photographs) Here, my friends, we have that most lamentable and problematic of objects: a unique and highly collectable item that we must honestly acknowledge is in distinctly uncollectable condition -- the very sort of thing that the overworked verbal shrug "it is what it is" was coined to describe. And yet -- and yet -- there's no denying that it IS a thing, and quite a thing at that: an INSCRIBED copy of the FIRST printing of renowned artist Ed Ruscha's iconic first book, published under his own imprint in a numbered edition of just 400 copies (this being No. 87). The work itself is not "rare" -- there was a second edition (500 copies, 1967) and a third (a whopping 3,000 copies, 1969) -- and if your only ambition is to own a "nice" copy of this famous and influential work, well, heck, you might not even have to spend yourself into the four figures, and you'll still be one-up on the Library of Congress, which famously and politely rejected and returned the copy that Ed himself sent them in 1963, and to this day does not own a copy of any edition. (A not-too-subtle lack of respect for the 1960s L.A. art scene at play, maybe?) Anyway, those later printings are also "what they are" -- but THIS copy, for all its manifest depredations, is in a very rarefied class, having been INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the artist/author/photographer (in the year of publication, no less), as follows: "For / Sonny / From / Ed / 1963." The inscription has been authenticated by Mr. Ruscha himself, in an email exchange with our consignor in the Fall of 2022; a printed copy of these emails will be provided along with the book. Unfortunately, though, he couldn't recall, almost 60 years after the fact, who this "Sonny" was. It's fun to speculate that the inscribee might have been one of the notable Sonnys of American History -- Bono, Barger, Tufts, Jurgensen, and Liston come readily to mind -- but lacking any hard evidence, that's just a whole lotta wishful thinking. (And anyway, "Sonny" is about as common and all-American a nickname as you can find: even my little Nebraska hometown, population 900-something, had three or four Sonnys.) I have my own theory (although that's all it is), based on a comment of Ruscha's in a 1965 interview: "I showed the first book to a gasoline station attendant. He was amused." So I think that "Sonny" might well have been just such a pump jockey -- maybe even that very one -- possibly at one of the artist's regular fill-'er-up stops at the L.A. end of the California-to-Oklahoma journey that his book photographically traces. He might have been one of the Sons at the "Brown & Sons" APCO station in Oklahoma City, or maybe the guy who checked Ed's oil at the station that he depicted in his famous 1963 painting "Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas" (subsequently rendered as a widely-distributed print). Or -- to really play out the art-world fantasy -- maybe Sonny was the day-shift man at the famous "Double Standard" station, at the five-way intersection on the western edge of West Hollywood, that Dennis Hopper so memorably photographed (also circa 1963) -- which would make Ed's painting and Dennis's photo visual second cousins (or something like that). This is all wildly conjectural, of course -- but look at the poor little thing! Can we easily dismiss the idea that this shamefully mishandled copy of "Twentysix Gasoline Stations" might well have been stored IN a gas station for a few decades, possibly fallen behind an oil drum or lost beneath a pile of greasy rags? Maybe our man Sonny got fed up with the gas-pumping racket, stuffed his handful of belongings into a beat-up cardboard suitcase, lit out for Hawaii (where this copy was discovered by our consignor), and lived happily ever after as a surf-riding beach bum. It's unlikely that we'll ever know for sure, but you have to admit that none of these riffs are outside the realm of possibility. (It might as well be noted, too, that not a hell of a lot of copies of the first edition appear to have been signed at all; of the handful that have sold at auction in the last few decades -- at prices higher than we're asking here -- none have borne any authorial scribbling.) Better still, if you take possession of this unique copy, you will also assume custody of The Mystery of Sonny. If you can uncover the backstory, bully for you; but if not, you can just take my approach and make up your own. So to come full circle: "it is what it is" -- which is, in any event, a miracle of survival.

RUSCHA, Edward (illustrator). Los Angeles]: Edward Ruscha, 1962 [ie 1967]. Second edition, one of 500 unnumbered copies. Self published and printed by The Cunningham Press, Alhambra, California. The first edition was an edition of 400 numbered copies printed in 1963. Small quarto (7 x 5 1/2 inches; 179 x 140 mm). 48 pp. With numerous black-and-white photographs. Publisher's full printed wrappers lettered in red. In the original glassine dust jacket. Wittenborn and Company sticker on rear inner wrapper. Overall a fine copy. With numerous photosgrapsh by Ruscha of gasoline stations throughout the American southwest, including California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. "Twentysix Gasoline Stations, a modest publication consisting of black and white photographs with captions, is an iconic artist book. The photographs are of petrol stations, along the highway between Ruscha's home in Los Angeles and his parent's house in Oklahoma City. Clive Phillpot, writer, curator and former Director of the Library at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, observes that the photographs are not reproduced in a linear sequence, with five photographs out of order. Taken from the highway and often including large areas of forecourt or road, the shots appear to be simply factual records of the petrol stations. Each opening of the book reveals one or two photographs in varying but repeated layouts, with the photographs set in relatively large areas of white space. The captions consist of the name of the petrol station and its location (for example, â Texaco, Sunset Strip, Los Angeles' and â Flying A, Kingman, Arizona'). The front cover has the title printed in red as three separate lines, the stark brightness of the design muted by the wrap around protective cover. The book is the first in a sequence of photographic artist books by Ruscha. Twentysix Gasoline Stations was first published in 1963 (although the title page states 1962) in an edition of 400 numbered copies. It was subsequently republished in two unnumbered editions. Ruscha's books, and this one in particular, are considered seminal in the history of artist books." (Tate Gallery). HBS 68916. $3,250.

Condition: Near fine. Third edition. Third edition of the first of Ruscha's sixteen books and an iconic early artist's book. Inspired by the look and feel of the books he encountered at the bouquiniste stands on the Left Bank during a 1961 trip to Paris, as well as his own work as a typesetter and printers devil, Ruscha self-published TWENTYSIX GAS STATIONS with an aesthetic reminiscent of iconic Editions Gallimard paperbacks. Conceiving first of the title, Ruscha took photographs to fill the requisite number on a road trip from Los Angeles to visit his mother in his hometown of Oklahoma City. The photographs, labeled with the station name and location, together form a dotted line between LA and Oklahoma, creating out of these stoically framed images of banal locations a deep emotional resonance. [Phillpot, CATALOGUE RAISONNE, 60]. Wraps. 8vo. Publisher's wraps in original glassine. SIGNED by Ruscha at inside front cover. Mild toning and chipping to glassine with price sticker at front flap and some creasing to flaps. Distributor sticker at final page. Trivial touches of wear to wraps at edges. Interior bright and clean. Near fine.

RUSCHA, Edward. Twenty-six Gasoline Stations. Unpaginated artist's book.Illustrated with 26 black and white photographic plates. 8vo., bound in original publisher's wrappers. Los Angeles: Ed Ruscha, 1963. Second Edition. Photographs of gas stations taken while travelling from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City, Ruscha's hometown (mysteriously, the final photograph is of a gas station in Groom, Texas). His first in a series of artist books and considered by many his most important. A fine copy in original glassine wrapper, rare thus. One of 500 copies.

AUTOGRAPHED COPY IN NEAR PERFECT CONDITION. THIRD EDITION. REPLACED GLASSINE JACKET A BIT BROWNED BUT NOT AFFECTING THE PRISTINE WHITE COVER.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Second edition, 1967, one of 500 unnumbered copies. Glassine wrapper shows minor wear, tear, and tanning. Cover with a few very minor spots of wear. Pages are clean.

[48] pp.; 18 x 14 cm; sewn bound; black-and-white; edition size 3000; unsigned and unnumbered; offset-printed Edward Ruscha's first artist's book - and by far his best known title. Features black-and-white photographs of gasoline stations in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas captioned in all caps text with the name of the gas station pictured and it's location. References : "Various Small Books : Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha" by Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton, Hermann Zschiegner, Phil Taylor, Mark Rawlinson. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2013, pp. 8, 9. "International General, Distributing Independently Produced Vanguard Art Books, Catalogues and Information" by Seth Siegelaub. New York, NY : International General, 1971. No. 1 in "Books by Edward Ruscha" by Edward Ruscha. Munich, Germany : Galerie Heiner Friedrich, 1970. "Esthétique du Livre d'Artiste 1960 / 1980" by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix. Paris, France : Jean-Michel Place / Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1997, pp. 18, 26. "The Works of Edward Ruscha" by Edward Ruscha, Anne Livet, Henry T. Hopkins, Peter Plagens, Dave Hickey. New York / San Francisco, NY / CA : Hudson Hills Press / San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982, pp. 123. "Artist / Author : Contemporary Artists' Books" by Cornelia Lauf, Clive Phillpot, Glenn O'Brien, Jane Rolo, Brian Wallis, Martha Wilson, Thomas Padon. New York, NY : Distributed Art Publishers / The American Federation of Arts, 1998, pp. 33. "Book as Artwork 1960 / 1972" by Germano Celant. London, United Kingdom : Nigel Greenwood Inc. Ltd., 1972, pp. 60. "Artists' Books : The Book as a Work of Art, 1963 - 1995" by Stephen Bury. Hants, United Kingdom : Scolar Press, 1995, pp. 31. Very Good. 5 mm. area of light staining to recto and 1 cm. and 3 mm. areas of light soiling to verso. 4 cm. area of faint markings from erased pencil notations on title page. Light rubbing of page edges and light sloping of pages. Otherwise Fine clean and unmarked.

[48] pp.; 18 x 14 cm; sewn bound; black-and-white; edition size 3000; unsigned and unnumbered; offset-printed Edward Ruscha's first artist's book - and by far his best known title. Features black-and-white photographs of gasoline stations in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas captioned in all caps text with the name of the gas station pictured and it's location. References : "Various Small Books : Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha" by Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton, Hermann Zschiegner, Phil Taylor, Mark Rawlinson. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2013, pp. 8, 9. "International General, Distributing Independently Produced Vanguard Art Books, Catalogues and Information" by Seth Siegelaub. New York, NY : International General, 1971. No. 1 in "Books by Edward Ruscha" by Edward Ruscha. Munich, Germany : Galerie Heiner Friedrich, 1970. "Esthétique du Livre d'Artiste 1960 / 1980" by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix. Paris, France : Jean-Michel Place / Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1997, pp. 18, 26. "The Works of Edward Ruscha" by Edward Ruscha, Anne Livet, Henry T. Hopkins, Peter Plagens, Dave Hickey. New York / San Francisco, NY / CA : Hudson Hills Press / San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982, pp. 123. "Artist / Author : Contemporary Artists' Books" by Cornelia Lauf, Clive Phillpot, Glenn O'Brien, Jane Rolo, Brian Wallis, Martha Wilson, Thomas Padon. New York, NY : Distributed Art Publishers / The American Federation of Arts, 1998, pp. 33. Very Good / Fine. Light yellowing of cover and page edges and yellowing of vellum dust-jacket. Chipping of dust jacket edges with 1.5 cm. area of loss to top left area of spine and covers. Contents clean and unmarked.

Soft cover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 3rd Edition. Third edition, 1969 of book originally published in 1963. Slim volume, 14cm x 18cm, unpaginated. Soft card wraps, red lettering to the spine and upper board and in the original glassine dust jacket. This issue was an edition of 3,000 copies. Twentysix Gasoline Stations was Ruscha s first artist s book and was originally published in April 1963 on his own imprint National Excelsior Press. It was an important precursor and influence on the then emerging artist's book culture in the US. The book is spine slanted but otherwise in Fine condition, the jacket is yellowed to the spine and has minimal chipping at the spine ends. Overall an excellent copy of this landmark work.

brossura editoriale con velina. Condition: ottimo stato. 48 b/n. Lingua: inglese.

In 1963, when Ed Ruscha published Twentysix Gasoline Stations, his first book, he sent two copies to the U.S. Copyright Office, one to establish copyright, the other destined for the collection of the Library of Congress. Great! Recognition for the young artist. As you might imagine, LC receives a great deal of copyright material that it cannot store forever: commercial catalogues, advertising material, and many self-published books, among others. Jennings Wood, Chief, Exchange and Gift Division, sent Ed a very polite letter on October 2, 1963, as follows: "Dear Mr. Ruscha: I am, herewith, returning this copy of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, which the Library of Congress does not wish to add to its collection. We are, nevertheless, deeply grateful for your thoughtful consideration of our interests." What a blow! Ed turned this seeming setback into one of the wittiest pieces ever to appear in Artforum: a five-inch display ad on p. 55 of the March 1964 issue (volume 2, number 9). The following text accompanies a photograph of a hand holding the book: "REJECTED Oct. 2, 1963 by the Library of Congress Washington 25, D.C. copies available @ $3.00, National Excelsior 2351-1/2 Vestal Avenue Los Angeles 26, Calif. Wittenborn & Company 1018 Madison Avenue New York 21, New York." A facsimile copy of this letter accompanies the issue. This is item M6 in Edward Ruscha: editions 1959-1989 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1999). LC still does not own a copy of any edition of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, by the way. Later, Ruscha did layout and design work for Artforum, including the superbly inventive cover for the Surrealism issue, September 1966, volume 5, number 1 (see separate listing). Several pristine copies available of this rare, March 1964 issue of Artforum. Richly illustrated (no color this early). 60 pp. 27 x 26.5 cm (about 11 inches square). Cover by Larry Rivers. Includes articles on recent American ceramic art (Voulkos, etc.), Shiko Munakata, Pop Art in Canada, and, most notably, John Coplans on Wallace Berman. **Free domestic shipping with direct order.