Crackers by Ed Ruscha shows two objects suspended against a soft grey ground — a closed book floating in the upper portion of the image, its spine facing away, the title CRACKERS visible in small letters on the cover, and below it a thin rectangular sheet, pale and translucent, hovering in the lower register. Both objects cast faint shadows. The composition is spare and slightly surreal, the two elements related but not touching, the space between them unaccounted for.

The book is Ruscha's own — Crackers, published in 1969, was one of his artist books, a narrative told in photographs and text that followed a scenario involving a hotel room, a woman, a bottle of wine, and a cracker placed on top of it. The story, such as it was, came from a Mason Williams script, and Ruscha photographed it with the same neutral documentary approach he had applied to gasoline stations and parking lots — the camera recording events without emphasis or editorialising. What made Crackers unusual within his book series was the presence of narrative: unlike Twentysix Gasoline Stations or Every Building on the Sunset Strip, which catalogued without sequence or drama, Crackers had a beginning, a middle, and an end, however deadpan its telling.

The lithograph made a year later takes the book as its subject in the same way Various Small Fires did — the publication rendered as an object, lifted from its context as a cheap democratic multiple and placed within the gallery register of a framed and editioned print. The floating translucent sheet below the book introduces an element the original publication did not have: ambiguity, the sense of something not quite identified, an object whose relationship to the book above it is left entirely open. Produced in 1970 in an edition of thirty, it is a historically significant work from the period that established Ruscha's reputation as one of the most original artists of his generation.

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