[4] The book delivers exactly what its title promises, reproducing 26 photographs of gasoline stations next to captions indicating their brand and location.

The last image is of a Fina gasoline station in Groom, Texas, which Ruscha has suggested should be seen as the beginning of the return journey, 'like a coda'.

It has been suggested that these reprints were a deliberate attempt to flood the market in order to maintain the book's status as a cheap, mass-produced commodity.

[2] Of the work, Johanna Drucker said: Ruscha's books combined the literalness of early California pop art with a flat-footed photographic aesthetic informed by minimalist notions of repetitive sequence and seriality....Thirty years later, with a quarter of a century of mainstream artworld activity between, the aspect of shock-effect and humor has diminished somewhat.

And away from the Catholic Church too, and Sister Daniella who beat my knuckles with a pencil the one year I was in parochial school.

[10]Ruscha had visited Europe in 1961, and been particularly taken by the books he saw for sale "on the street, in those little bookstalls," and been impressed by the "non-commercial look... a strange kind of sober design including the typography and the binding and everything.

"[11] Back in Los Angeles, he conceived the idea initially as a play on words, deciding upon the title first, then working on the typography and design before taking the photographs.

Dated 1962 in the foreword and dedicated to Patty Callahan, the book comprises twenty-six photographs of various dimensions and proportions; most are laid out on a single page with the text facing the image; some go across the double spread, a few are placed next to each other.

Copies of the book are kept in public collections across the world, including MOMA, V&A, Tate, and the National Gallery of Australia.