内容简介

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 suc- cess of this daring move proved that Taschen was not alone in thinking that the art-book market should be democratized. Soon he began reprint-ing 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 VanGogh: The Complete Paintings hit bookstores around the world.