Allen Ruppersberg (born 1944) is among the first generation of American conceptual artists. Allen Ruppersberg: and Writing presents a wide array of the artist’s text-based works from the late 1960s through to his most recent projects. A companion volume to Allen Ruppersberg Drawing , it gathers writings (and visual works containing writing) from series and projects such as Al’s Café , From the South Forty to the Bunkhouse , Great Acts of the Imagination , Le Mot Juste , Free Poetry , Obits and Studies , and excerpts from The Novel that Writes Itself and Great Speckled Bird . In his introduction to the book, poet Bill Berkson writes: “Ruppersberg’s co-exemplars are John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha … Because they are visual artists first, they present language foremost as image--color, shape, light and scale being conditioned often enough by lettering, the quality of handwriting or font, or the format of a book. The upshot is a blithe alchemical switch of sign into symbol.”