A remarkably slim premise for a book (especially when considering the original price) with thirty-six photos more or less related to gas stations. They are all from newspaper photo morgues, discarded now that papers have switch over to a digital format. The author has been picking them up here and there.
Individually I don't think the photos are of any consequence and collectively they just about hang together because of the common element of the red grease pencil or white paint cropping marks used by the layout artists to tell the production staff where to trim the photos. To non-newspaper folk these photos, with their casual scribbles and actually on the photo as well, probably seem quite intriguing and if they were to turn the print over they'll see more information that only makes sense to the news desks.
The book's format is as odd as the photo selection. The thirty-six photos fill up the pages until a four-page black paper insert, the spread of this has an interview with the author and George Kaplan (and printed in silver ink). This is followed by the backs of the photos to the end of the book. I would have thought it better to show the front and then the back on a spread because in many cases the backs contain pasted captions from the paper explaining the photo. The pages are unnumbered so flipping backwards and forwards to find out some detail about the pictures becomes rather tedious.Also the photos are printed on a very slightly rough paper where as the backs are printed on much more smoother paper. They are all printed with a two hundred screen.
The title has a slight curiosity feel to it because the images are from the media but real gas station fans should consider David Freund's four book box-set 'Gas stop' with 574 photos taken across the US during the late 1970s.
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