Josef Heinrich Darchinger, Wirtschaftswunder

In the year 1980, an entrepreneurial-minded eighteen-year-old opened a comic book shop in his native Cologne to sell and trade from his massive collection. Within a year he was publishing catalogs promoting his wares, and then in 1984 a breakthrough occurred: he purchased 40,000 remainder copies of a René Magritte book with text only in English, reselling them for a fraction of their original price. The success of this daring move proved that he was not alone in thinking that the art-book market needed to be democratized. Why should cultural enlightenment be reserved for the wealthy. Soon he began reprinting books under his own name for budget prices and the next year he published his first original art book, Picasso. Starting in the late 1980s, his company established subsidiaries around the world and continued to cement its reputation as a publisher of excellent-value art books while branching out into new areas such as architecture, design, photography, lifestyle, and classics. The young man's name was, of course, Benedikt Taschen, and under his leadership the TASCHEN brand has grown into one of the most successful and unique publishers in the global market, distributed worldwide in over twenty languages.

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