Unsigned and inexpensively printed, Ruscha's photography books are antithetical to the traditional limited-edition livre d’artiste, or artist's book. Their banal subject matter and documentary style are indebted to the remarkable pictures of signs and vernacular architecture that American photographer Walker Evans made in the 1930s, but their deadpan, cool aesthetic is radically different. While each book chronicles an aspect of Los Angeles or the artist's round-trip drives between LA and Oklahoma, their use of photography as a form of map-making or topographical study signals a conceptual, rather than documentary, thrust. Not coincidentally, *Every Building on the Sunset Strip*—formatted like a film strip—was chosen by artist Sol LeWitt to accompany his essay "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," published in the summer 1967 issue of Artforum.