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Taschen's Great Adventure began back in 1980, when eighteen-year-old
Benedikt Taschen opened a shop in his native Cologne, Germany, to
market his massive comics collection. Within a year he began publishing
catalogues promoting his wares, but it wasn't until 1984 that his first art-book
breakthrough occurred: he purchased 40,000 remainder copies of
a Magritte book printed in English, reselling them for a fraction of their
original price. From a young age, Taschen had been interested in art but
found that art books were too expensive and hard to obtain, and the success
of this daring move proved that Taschen was not alone in thinking
that the art-book market should be democratized. Soon he began reprinting
books under his own name for budget prices and the next year he
published his first original title and the first book in the Basic Art series:
Picasso. Before long, high-quality-yet-still-inexpensive hardcover books
ware added to the lineup and in 1989 the landmark double-jumbo Van
Gogh: The Complete Paintings hit bookstores around the world.
Starting in the late 1980s, Taschen established subsidiaries across
the globe and continued to cement its reputation as a publisher of
excellent-value books while branching out into new areas such as architecture,
design, photography, lifestyle and classics. In 2000, Taschen
surprised the world by breaking the record for the most expensive book
published in the 20th century copy #1 of Helmut Newton's SUMO, signed
by over 80 celebrities featured in it, fetched over $300,000 at a charity
auction. A year later Taschen launched its cinema collection with Billy
Wilder's Some Like it Hot Then, in 2003, Taschen tipped the scales with
its massive, legendary Muhammad Ali tribute book, GOAT.
Twenty-five years after Benedikt Taschen opened his little comics
shop, Taschen has grown into one of the most successful and unique
publishers in the global market, publishing an eclectic variety of books for
people of all tastes and budget ranges, distributed worldwide in over
twenty languages. Within the space of the last few years, Taschen has
opened bookshops in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, London, Brussels,
Berlin and Copenhagen with plans to keep expanding to new cities as
our Great Adventure continues. For the future of publishing keep your
eye on Taschen.
