Though its title coyly pretends to be small, Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha is actually a large, substantial book. Edited and compiled by Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton, and Hermann Zschiegner, Various Small Books provides an illustrated and annotated catalog of artists’ books inspired by Ed Ruscha’s books. It also includes an essay by Mark Rawlinson and descriptive texts by Phil Taylor. Ruscha created a number of books in the 1960s and 1970s that helped to create the field of contemporary artists’ books. Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, published in 1962, contains photographs of exactly twenty-six gas stations along Route 66 in a slim volume. In Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), photos of all the buildings on a mile and a half of the Sunset Strip are laid out in an accordion binding, stretching out to twenty-five feet. Another well-known work, Various Small Fires and Milk (1964), features fifteen photographs of small fires, such as a lighter and a cigarette smoked by a young woman, followed by an image of a glass of milk. These works combine photography, dry humor, and Conceptual art. Created as inexpensive multiples, they raise the form and design of the book to an object of artistic consideration in which the method and appearance of production is paramount. In a 1965 Artforum interview with John Coplans, Ruscha explained that “one of the purposes of my books has to do with making a mass-produced object. The final product has a very commercial, professional feel to it” (Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002: 24). Ruscha’s books are significant because they function as entire works, incorporating offset production, photography, books, typography, and design as a whole. Irony, flat photographic style, and bold cover typography typify Ruscha’s books from the 1960s and 1970s. The book form is inherent to each work, and the photographs would not have the same meaning if they were exhibited individually on gallery walls.

In the fifty years since the production of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, the field of book art has greatly transformed. By using the book in an innovative way at the time, Ruscha has become a founding figure, and idol, for some contemporary book artists. Though his small books were originally and purposefully inexpensive, their increasing value and rarity has created an aura around them for artists and collectors. Available for a few dollars in the 1960s, a copy of a Ruscha can sell for thousands today. The contemporary art world’s reverence for these photo bookworks and their creator is exemplified by Various Small Books. Brouws, Burton, and Zschiegner are photographers and artists interested both in Ruscha’s books and in current books that have been made in his style. Each of them has created books that reference Ruscha, and their work appears in Various Small Books. The typography and layout of the cover intentionally imitate the design of Ruscha’s small paperbacks, but upon closer inspection, the volume is a sturdy hardcover. From afar, Various Small Books could be another of Ruscha’s books, but up close, the difference is immediately evident.

Many of the ninety-one books included in Various Small Books utilize the same typographical cover design or closely echo the themes, titles, and pacing of Ruscha’s works. Several provide a contemporary view of the original content. Jeff Brouws’s Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations (1992), Toby Mussman’s 29 Gas Stations and 26 Variety Stores (2005), Frank Eye’s Twenty-Four Former Filling Stations (2007), and Gabriel Lester’s Sixtytwo Gasoline Stations (2007) pay direct homage. Arranged in chronological order, each of the works is given one or two color images and a brief but well-developed aesthetic, historical, and political analysis by Taylor.

Numerous productions try to reimagine Ruscha’s projects using digital technology. In Macintosh Road Test (2000), Corrine Carlson, Karen Henderson, and Marla Hlady create a twenty-first-century version of Ruscha’s Royal Road Test (1967), in which a typewriter is thrown out of a moving car and photographed. The new version includes a Macintosh Plus computer and female protagonists, but otherwise replicates the original. Jonathan Lewis’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Twentysix Gasoline Stations (2003) are flipbooks with images taken from satellites and online MapQuest maps. Similarly, in Thirtyfour Parking Lots on Google Earth (2006), Zschiegner uses Google Earth to update the aerial views in Ruscha’s Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967). In Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Forty Years Later (2007), Susan Porteous uses satellite images to show the current state of the original work’s parking lots. Travis Shaffer’s Thirtyfour Parking Lots (2008) uses satellite images from Google to display parking lots. Individually, these works engage with Ruscha’s legacy in new ways. However, as a whole, the body of books that update Ruscha’s projects through digital technology, particularly Google maps or satellite images, becomes repetitive. Nonetheless, this effect is noteworthy: for a growing and varied field like artists’ books to get to the point of repetition is significant.

Other titles bring humor and surprise. Taking digital interventions from another angle, Twentysix Gasoline Stations 2.0 (2009) by Michael Maranda reproduces Twentysix Gasoline Stations without authorization by reprinting images from the book that have been published online. Playing with copyright, reproduction, and piracy in the internet age, this work creates a somewhat legible version of the original, seen through the lens of digital reproduction and online access. Various Unbaked Cookies and Milk (2010) by Marcella Hackbardt features images of chocolate chip cookie dough rolled into balls on a counter. Like Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, the final photo is of a glass of milk. The work seems harmless and slightly absurd at first, but Taylor points out the dough’s underlying politics: “the homey snack remains an unattained desire” without the fire of the original Ruscha book. “This unfinished quality of the subject matter ironically problematizes the notion of homage in and of itself, and the dependence on the (male) predecessor’s work as referent in order to substantiate its own meaning” (226). Another project that shifts the content of Ruscha’s original work away from an urban photographic scene is Real Estate Opportunities (2011) by Wendy Burton. Instead of Ruscha’s black-and-white images of land for sale in Los Angeles, Burton photographs empty birds’ nests. These rich, close-up color photographs of nests, berries, and other organic remnants have a completely different feel than the urban wide shots of the original. The connection between the inspiration and the product remains mysterious. As Hackbardt’s and Burton’s works show, the books that stand out the most among these “various small books” are the ones that bring unexpected content, techniques, or images.

Transformations can also happen to the form and presentation of the book. Books like Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Various Small Fires and Milk, and Real Estate Opportunities have a strong impact because their content is presented as a book. However, some galleries did display Ruscha’s books on the wall, rather than considering them as books: in No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America, 1960–1980, Betty Bright writes that “for Ruscha, a gallery’s choice to display his books flat, against the wall, underscores the limitations of the art world as much as it demonstrates the book’s intractable separateneness from that world” (New York: Granary Books, 2005: 120). Ruscha meant for his books to function as multiples in book form rather than unique art pieces. “I am not trying to create a precious limited edition book, but a mass-produced object of high order,” Ruscha explains to Coplans (27). Despite his intentions, his works have been presented and consumed both as mass-produced multiples and as limited editions. Several pieces in Various Small Books consider how the book is experienced. One work that inverts the typical book/gallery dynamic is Jennifer Dalton’s Getting to Know the Neighbors (2004). For this project, Dalton photographed all of the sites in two Brooklyn zip codes that were listed as potentially hazardous by the Environmental Protection Agency. She constructed a concertina binding, similar to Every Building on the Sunset Strip. But unlike Ruscha, Dalton made a unique book and intentionally displayed it in a Brooklyn art gallery. Taylor explains that Getting to Know the Neighbors “was unfurled atop a custom table snaking through” the gallery, so “that the viewing experience simulates a virtual walk through the neighborhood” (98). An image shows the dramatic gallery installation of the work. Though Ruscha’s books were specifically intended not to be gallery pieces, works inspired by him have utilized the gallery in new ways.

Like Burton, Noriko Ambe has taken inspiration from Ruscha’s books, but is oriented more toward the art gallery. Her artwork creates sculptural, three-dimensional landscape forms out of paper by cutting large stacks of pages into amorphous shapes. In 2008, she altered preexisting books, including works by Ruscha, in her Cutting Book Series. Ambe used Then and Now (2005), a work by Ruscha that revisits and updates locations he already photographed. Ambe took Ruscha’s book production and cut away at it, leaving a form that looks methodically, topographically eaten away, as if by an industrious and hungry insect in the library stacks. Ambe transforms Ruscha’s book into sculpture, morphing the smooth surface of his multiple into a unique, altered bookwork landscape. Ruscha’s works revel in their production, playing with the slick look of photography, offset printing, and bold typography: “what I really want is a professional polish, a clear-cut machine finish,” Ruscha tells Coplans (27). While Ruscha’s books are meant to be multiples, produced as if by machine rather than artist, Ambe creates a singular work that comes directly from the artist’s hand.

Various Small Books shows the many responses that artists have made to Ruscha’s books. Ranging from photo bookworks that directly imitate the style and content of the originals to unique, sculptural installations, these works show the range of the field, even when inspired by common source material. Since Ruscha produced his books, scholars have been writing about the significance of his work. Various Small Books provides a different vantage point for scholarship about Ruscha, since it maps his influence on the next generation of artists’ productions. This hefty book is noteworthy for the field of book art because it marks a crossover for books about artists’ books: the publisher, MIT, is a significant academic press. As the field of book-art production and criticism grows in size, it has increasingly become a subject of academic scholarship, such as Garrett Stewart’s theoretical Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). The publication of Various Small Books serves as an important moment for writing in the field: through the popularity of Ruscha’s books and his influence, this focused, critical survey of contemporary artists’ books has gained recognition in the larger art and design worlds.

Shortly after publication, Various Small Books went into a second printing, indicating the unexpected popularity of the work, as Carol Vogel writes in a recent New York Times article (“Conceptual Inspiration, by the Book,” February 28, 2013: AR1). In another sign of the book’s importance and popularity, I first encountered Various Small Books when I saw it on display at a public library, which is an unusual place to find either artists’ books or critical works about the field. The small size of Ruscha’s books belies their impact, and the wry humor of the Various Small Books title evokes this playfulness. Various Small Books is a popular publication because of the success of Ruscha’s books and the proliferation of artists’ books. Like the many book artists influenced by Ruscha’s photo books, scholars and publishers will be inspired by Various Small Books. Other critical and academic works about artists’ books are sure to follow.