CBAA Meeting and Symposium and Ed Ruscha

The College Book Art Association (CBAA) annual meeting and Symposium took place January 8th, 9th and 10th, 2015. The event was at the beautiful Scripps College campus, part of the Claremont Colleges in Claremont CA. The symposium was organized by Kitty Maryatt and was a huge success. It focussed on two exemplary works, Sonia Delauney's Transsibérien and Ed Rucsha's first book Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

On Thursday, January 8th, Kitty drove a van full of us out to the Getty Research Institute. There Marcia Reed, the Head Curator, took us behind the scenes and showed us original copies of the Sonia Delauney book and also Ed Ruscha's production mechanicals, photographs, and notebooks for Every Building on Sunset Strip. We were also shown some other amazing book works from the same year (1913) that Delauney published her book.

That is Marcia in the red jacket, and Kitty Maryatt in the gold-brocade jacket.

In addition to all of the mechanicals for the book, we were also able to look at Ed Ruscha's bluish-green accounting notebook where he broke out all of the costs for the production of Sunset Strip, and also a very long list of sales of the book and who he sent gift copies too.

This is detail of the mechanical board where Ruscha pasted the original photos along with the street numbers.

 This is the section where Ruscha meticulously broke down every cost for the production of the book.

Two pages of the section that lists sales and gifts to many people in the art world.

The copy of EBOSS that the Getty owns had belonged to Ed's wife and contains a funny inscription to her:

On Saturday, my panel colleagues, Kate Palmer Albers and Cynthia Marsh, and I each gave a presentation on three different viewpoints of Twentysix Gasoline Stations. My lecture was on the production of this iconic book.

That evening there was an interview panel with Ed Ruscha himself, moderated by Marcia Reed. The three of us were asked to provided three questions for Ruscha.