'Twentysix Gasoline Stations' is a photobook by Ed Ruscha, a photographer, printmaker, painter and filmmaker. 'Twentysix gasoline stations' was begun in 1962, first published in 1963 and reprinted in 1969. The book comprises 48 pages, with 26 images of the filling stations passed by Ruscha on his regular journey along Route 66 between Los Angeles and his home in Oklahoma City. The first in a series of photobooks by Ruscha which dealt with banal, repetitive cityscape features from the perspective of a supposed ‘drive-by’, 'Twentysix gasoline stations' offers a commentary on the increasing artificiality of everyday environments.

Ruscha’s choice of the book as his artistic medium for 'Twentysix Gasoline Stations' is also of great significance to both the work’s concept and the wider history of artists’ books. Rather than utilising the photobook as an end-product which combines in one place a series of images already produced, as photographic tradition had dictated, Ruscha came up with the book’s title and even its front-cover design before shooting any of its content. Not only this, but Ruscha intentionally designed 'Twentysix Gasoline Stations' to be inexpensive and easily reproducible, going against the grain of ‘fine art’ as an expensive and luxurious asset. In his 2002 anthology entitled ‘Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages’, Ruscha remarked that ‘I had this idea for a book title – Twentysix Gasoline Stations – and it became a fantasy rule in my mind that I had to follow’. Ruscha notes in the same anthology that he adopted ‘a format’ for 'Twentysix Gasoline Stations', with each image ‘plugged into the system’. In this sense, 'Twentysix Gasoline Stations' departed from tradition by suggesting that the photobook could be both an art object and an affordable, reproducible instruction manual. What made Ruscha’s suggestion so pivotal in the history of the photobook, is that it proposed an entirely new approach to the relationship between photography and its publication. 'Twentysix Gasoline Stations' consciously echoed Duchamp’s idea of the ‘ready-made’: the notion that art does not need to be ‘created’ as such, but that the artist can make anything a piece of art by giving it a spotlight or format.