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| 23:22 Sun 11 May 2008 |
TASCHEN - Trust your instincts, however bizarre |
Tuesday, 19 December 2006 |
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 FINE ART. CHEAP HOTELS. CONTEMPORARY DESIGN. SUBVERSIVE sexuality. These are just some of the eclectic personal interests Benedikt Taschen has turned into a worldwide publishing empire with annual sales estimated at $100 million. Taschen lives in the Los Angeles hills but was born in Cologne, Germany in 1961. He is one of those lucky people who always knew what he wanted to do, and what he wanted to do turned out to have enormous commercial potential. The key to his success appears to be his ability to make decisions, combined with a selfassured, if unorthodox, working style: he rises at noon and doesn't work long hours, but tries to be as effective as possible when he is in the office. Taschen first dabbled in his chosen profession at age eight, when he set up a booth on the fringes of an art market to sell drawings he had made of vampires, netting a healthy $490. By thirteen, he had a mail-order business trading comic books. "You always come to the question where you have to decide whether to sell or collect,"¯ he recalls, I stopped collecting and became a dealer. At eighteen, he opened his own comic book shop in Cologne, helped by funding from his parents, both doctors. Publishing followed: his first effort was a comic book called Sally Forth, whose cover featured a naked blonde surrounded by gnomes with bulging eyeballs. Then, in 1984, he played a hunch, borrowing money from his family to buy up 40,000 remaindered copies of an English-language book on the artist Ren Magritte, selling them for double the price back in Cologne. There was, Taschen had discovered, enormous demand for high-quality art books from the general public the problem was most publishers printed them in small numbers and charged the earth for them. Not Taschen, who entered fine art publishing with a book of Annie Leibovitz photographs, followed by a book on Salvador Dali that he sent to bookstores accompanied by a poster that depicted the artist looking shocked under the words: genius like me for only $6.99? His business methods were straightforward but totally unconventional. Unlike other publishers, he insisted on retaining the rights to all his publications, wherever they were printed and sold. He negotiated large upfront payments to contributors in lieu of the usual ongoing royalties and he refused to allow bookstores to return unsold books (if they ended up in bargain basements, he didn't care). What we always wanted to do was to make the books accessible and available and affordable for everyone who was interested,¯ he said. In 1993, now ensconced in a beautiful converted mansion in Cologne, ”Taschen ran an advertisement in the trade magazine Publishers Weekly that showed him fully dressed next to his former wife, Angelika, in the nude, with the words "Luxury for less".¯ It caused a scandal in the staid world of books which, of course, was the point. A book on Hitler's documentary-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, caused another stir. Not all of Taschen's books are necessarily cheap or provocative, though: 2004, homage to Muhammad Ali was not only the heaviest book printed in living memory, but it cost $3,000 or $7,500 (depending on the edition), trumping the previous record-holder for price, an enormous monograph on the photographer Helmut Newton that came with its own coffee table for $1,500 (Sumo, now selling for $5,000), another Taschen publication, naturally. Both sold well, proving Taschen could not only dominate the cheap end of the market, but the top too. Today, with some fifteen million books sold annually, he has the means to indulge his passions, which include fogskin shoes, a French bulldog named Souci, and midcentury architecture. "I was very lucky,"¯ he says, because I was able to make a living out of something I wanted to do anyhow.¯ by Emily Ross & Angus Holland, exclusive online extract from 100 Great Businesses & the minds behind them. Buy online |
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