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 catalogs promoting his wares, but it wasn't until 1984 that his first art-book breakthrough occurred: he purchased 40,000 remainder copies of a Magdtte 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 success of this daring move proved that Taschen was not alone in thinking that the art-book market should be democratized. Soon he began reprinting 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.