Taschen

Benedikt Taschen was the youngest of five children, the son of two doctors, and a self-described lonely child with a fixation on Donald Duck comics. At 12 he started a mail-order business selling secondhand American comics from his bedroom. The day before his 19th birthday in February 1980 he opened a 250-square-foot comic shop in Cologne and put his entire collection up for sale. The pivot to art books came four years later at a trade show in New York, where he spotted 40,000 remainder copies of a Magritte monograph going for a dollar apiece. He borrowed money from his aunt, bought all of them, shipped them to Germany, and sold every copy within two months at an affordable retail price. The lesson was clear: the demand for beautiful art books was enormous -- the problem was access, both geographic and financial. He published his first original art book shortly after, on Salvador Dalí, and never looked back. Today TASCHEN is the most recognizable art book publisher in the world -- 13 bookshops, offices in Cologne, London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong, over a thousand titles in print spanning art, architecture, design, photography, film, fashion, and culture. The house published the most expensive book ever sold -- the Helmut Newton Sumo, signed by Newton himself, retailing for $10,000. It also publishes pocket-sized books for under $15. The range is the whole point. Benedikt now co-runs the company with his daughter Marlene. "Books plant seeds," he says. "As they did for me." On a registry, a TASCHEN title is the book guests pull off the shelf before dinner and don't put down until dessert -- and that stays on the coffee table for the next decade.