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 comicd collection. Within a year he began publishing catalogs promoting his wares, but it wasn`t until 1984 that his first art-book brakthrough occurred: he purchased 40.000 remainder copies of a Magritte book printed in English, reselling them for a fraction of their original price.