Benedikt Taschen | |
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Born |
Cologne, West Germany |
10 February 1961
Occupation | Publisher |
Benedikt Taschen (born 10 February 1961), is a German publisher and contemporary art collector. He is the founder and managing director of the publishing house Taschen, one of the most successful international publishers, with illustrated publications on a range of themes including art, architecture, design, film, photography, pop culture, and lifestyle.
Benedikt Taschen is the youngest of five children; both of his parents were doctors. From an early age he was an enthusiastic reader and comic book fan. At 12 years old, he began a successful mail order business selling used comic books from the United States. In February 1980, the day before his 19th birthday, he opened a 250-square-foot (23 m2) comic book store, named TASCHEN COMICS, in his home town of Cologne, Germany, in which he put his extensive comic book collection up for sale. Soon he began publishing comic books himself. In 1984, his venture into the art book business began with a coup: with borrowed money from an aunt, he purchased 40,000 remainder copies of English-language Magritte monograph for one dollar a piece at a trade show in the United States. Within two months, he had resold all the books at an affordable retail price of 9.95 Deutsche Mark. To Taschen, this demonstrated a gap in the art book market, until then dominated by expensive editions, and made it clear there was demand for well-designed, inexpensive, multilingual illustrated art books. Emboldened by this success, he made his first publishing foray in art books with a monograph on photographer Annie Leibovitz. By the end of the 1980s TASCHEN titles were available in over a dozen languages at prices that made art books affordable to students and collectors alike.
By the late 1990s, he had become known in publishing. When Vanity Fair’s Matt Tyrnauer deemed him, “one of the few people in business who has the courage to do exactly what he wants whenever he wants to”, Benedikt Taschen tested the theory with Helmut Newton’s SUMO, the largest bound book of the 20th century.
SUMO is also the company’s most successful title of the last ten years and the precursor to Benedikt Taschen’s most ambitious personal project: GOAT — Greatest of All Time, a tribute to Muhammad Ali, published in Spring 2004. Four years in the making, GOAT weighs 75 lbs and is 20" x 20" in size, with nearly 800 pages of archival and original photographs, graphic artwork and articles and essays - including those of Ali himself.