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.