Ed Ruscha's artists' book, Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, published in 1968, marked a departure from his earlier photographic publications, most notably Twentysix Gasoline Stations in 1963. While his earlier works focused on mundane and everyday subjects, like gas stations and parking lots, Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass ventured into a different realm of visual exploration.

Nine Swimming Pools was Ruscha's eighth artists' book. In this book, Ruscha continued his documentation of the Los Angeles landscape, a theme that would become central to much of his work. However, this time, he turned his attention to swimming pools, which symbolized a quintessential aspect of Southern California culture. The photos were all taken of swimming pools at low-rent Las Vegas hotels. Each photograph in the book captures a different swimming pool, often devoid of people, and the images are presented without any accompanying text.

The inclusion of "a Broken Glass" in the title is intriguing, as it adds an element of narrative disruption to the otherwise straightforward documentation [7]. It raises questions and invites viewers to contemplate the significance of this broken glass in the context of the serene swimming pools.

"Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass" represents a shift in Ruscha's artistic journey, moving away from the banal and mundane to explore more complex and culturally charged subjects. It's a testament to his ability to capture the essence of a place and time through seemingly simple yet thought-provoking imagery, and it remains an influential work in the realm of contemporary art and photography.

Ed Ruscha, Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, 1968/1976
Original white wrappers with black lettering, 48 pp with 9 color photographic illustrations of swimming pools, and 1 of a broken glass against a blue background,. Self-published, Los Angeles, California. Second edition of 2000 copies. Missing glassine dust jacket, otherwise in mint condition.
Sold.

Edward Joseph Ruscha IV ( 1937) is an American artist associated with the pop art and conceptual art movements. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography and film. He is also noted for creating several artist's books. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California.[5] Ruscha achieved recognition for paintings incorporating words and phrases and for his many photographic books, all influenced by the deadpan irreverence of the Pop Art movement [2].

Between 1962 and 1978, Ruscha produced sixteen small artist's books:

Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963
Various Small Fires, 1964
Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965
Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966
Thirtyfour Parking Lots, 1967
Royal Road Test, 1967 (with Mason Williams and Patrick Blackwell)
Business Cards, 1968 (with Billy Al Bengston)
Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, 1968
Crackers, 1969 (with Mason Williams)
Real Estate Opportunities, 1970
Babycakes with Weights, 1970
A Few Palm Trees, 1971
Records, 1971
Dutch Details, 1971
Colored People, 1972
Hard Light, 1978 (with Lawrence Weiner) [2]

The 16 small artist's books remain definitive classics of the genre.
Stains (1969), in which Ruscha brought together 75 sheets of stains is rarely mentioned here, although this portfolio of mixed-media stains on paper is listed as a book following the catalogue raisonné.
Yet later he would also produce some deluxe editions, such as the high-profile Sayings from Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1995), a livre de peintre for which he created ten lithographs [8].

Ruscha's artist books have proved to be deeply influential, beginning with Bruce Nauman’s Burning Small Fires (1968), for which Nauman burned Ruscha's Various Small Fires and Milk (1964) and photographed the process. More than forty years later, photographer Charles Johnstone relocated Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations in Cuba, producing the portfolio Twentysix Havana Gasoline Stations (2008). A recent homage is One Swimming Pool (2013) by Dutch artist Elisabeth Tonnard, who re-photographed one of the photographs from Ruscha's Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968) and enlarged it to the size of a small swimming pool, consisting of 3164 pages the same size as the pages in Ruscha's original book. The pages of this ‘pool on a shelf’ can be detached to create the life-size installation.[6]