Taschen Bookstores Are A Little Bit of Heaven

You have to live in Hamburg or Chelsea (London) or SoHo (New York) or Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Köln or the like to have a Taschen book store, because they like being fancy. (The rest of you must make do with the website.) But behind the books that cost $1500 and the piles of bountiful, oversized photo books — many of which are delightful! The revised Helmut Newton book really is incredible — are extremely affordable titles by the publisher-purveyor. Their “Basic Art” and “Basic Architecture” series are usually priced at $9.99, which surely has to be at a loss. And they’re great for us who know a little about a lot, but really didn’t ever get a grasp on Giotto or Schiele. The architecture series also consists of enjoyable little primers, from Calatrava to Gropius. Eerily, most all of these books are exactly 96 pages. But it’s their “Basic Genre” series that really excels.

Obviously their book on African Art is by necessity a breeze-through toe-dip, but you’ll walk out knowing (and appreciating) things you’d never known about. I found the book on “icons” particularly cool: looking at how representation of religious figures changed over hundreds of years seems key to looking at paintings now, paying attention to what’s “flat” and what’s “dimensional.”

And while in the store or on the website, you are free to either enjoy or completely avoid the rather intense naked books! Taschen is reasonably famous for The Big Penis Book 3D and The Big Book of Breasts 3D and they’re extremely popular but I… I… well, I guess I’m more in need of learning about Frédéric Chaubin’s documentation of Soviet brutalism than I am in brushing up on the various shapes and strangenesses of genitalia. Your mileage, it may vary.

I guess I will say that if you grew up Mormon or otherwise separated from nakedness that there is a wealth of information for you in those pages.

But Taschen’s real value is in doing other kinds of things that no one else would do — like a glorious republication of Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities. The reproduction is entirely done from the hand-painted originals, and at $39.99, it’s a bargain, since one of the last remaining originals went for nearly half a million dollars not long ago.

And? Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made? It is a 1112-page excavation of Kubrick’s own crazy excavations, devoted to a film that was never made 40 years ago. How great is that?

Even without a dollar in my pocket, as so often happens, I find store-browsing delightful. Getting to play with the books that I’d never pay top-dollar for is like a crash course on the history of some of the most famous photographers, things you’d never get to see unless you have access to the Conde Nast archives. Treating Taschen like a browsing library works just fine.

Note! The Beverly Hills and London stores are about to have a big bargain basement sale! Starting June 17th: “thousands of slightly damaged and display copies from TASCHEN on sale at bargain basement prices, 50–75% off.” Why, I’m slightly damaged too, that sounds perfect.

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