Various Small Fires by Ed Ruscha (1970) shows the artist's own book standing upright on its fore-edge, spine facing away, the pages fanned open so that the title — VARIOUS across the top, SMALL in the middle, FIRES at the base — reads down the face of the opened leaves. The book floats in a soft grey atmosphere, rendered in the graphite tones of lithography, isolated and monumental, a modest paperback publication given the presence of a sculptural object. The image is approximately the same age as the book it portrays.

Various Small Fires and Milk was published in 1964 as one of Ruscha's first artist books — a sequence of photographs of small combustions, a lighter flame, a burning cigarette, a gas ring, a struck match — produced cheaply, priced at three dollars, and distributed through bookshops not galleries. The ideas to make books rather than paintings was a deliberate rejection of the art market's logic of scarcity and preciousness: editions of hundreds, available to anyone, the photographs deadpan and unbeautiful, the subject matter selected precisely because it carried no obvious artistic value. It was one of the most consequential choices in postwar American art, influencing a generation of artists who understood that distribution was itself a formal choice.

By 1970, six years after the original publication, Ruscha had begun to reflect on the status those books had acquired. The lithograph takes an object designed to circulate freely and fixes it in a single image — the book no longer read but looked at, its pages no longer turned but held open, the title that ran across a sequence of photographs now compressed onto the face of the standing volume. The shift from democratic publication to gallery print is the work's subject, a quiet acknowledgement that even the most deliberately anti-precious object eventually finds its way into a frame.

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