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

were 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.