Benedikt Taschen

Benedikt Taschen is a publisher, contemporary art collector, and founder of TASCHEN, one of the world’s most successful international publishing houses. Starting from a comic book store in Cologne, Germany at age 18, he built a global brand by making visually striking, high-quality books accessible to a wider audience. Under Taschen’s leadership, the illustrated publications celebrate a wide range of themes, spanning art, architecture, design, film, photography, pop culture, and lifestyle. Benedikt Taschen has published works ranging from affordable art books to ambitious collector’s editions, including Helmut Newton’s SUMO and the monumental Muhammad Ali tribute GOAT – Greatest of All Time. Today, TASCHEN has twelve stores worldwide, including Beverly Hills, New York, Brussels, and Paris. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  When I was starting to collect comic books, I went two or three times a day to thrift stores in Cologne looking for new arrivals of old books. But I thought I would be the only boy in Germany doing this. Later, I found out that there was already a small market of others.

• 0:47Rick Rubin?

  Comic book collectors.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Comic book collectors, and they were all like 10, 20 years older than me. You know, they were buying, looking for the lost dreams of their childhoods, so to say. And when I understood that they paid real money for this, real money was at that time, let's say, 5 marks, or 10, or 20 or so. But it was good, if you paid 20 cents and you sold it for 20 marks, well, nothing wrong with that. So I became a dealer in comic books. And I typed, with a typewriter, I was in an alphabetical order, writing down all these comic book series

• 1:32Speaker 01

  and which numbers I had and the condition. And I sent it out, let's say, twice a year or so. And it started in the 70s, and there were comic book conventions. And I went there, and I was always the youngest, and people kind of thought that, you know, all these comic book collectors were kind of nerdy, you know? Because, let's put it this way, not that I didn't like them, but I felt I was different, different in a way, because these people were only interested in this and this, like totally focused on one detail and here. And that was never... I appreciated it very much, but I thought, "There is a world around, beside of this."

• 2:17Speaker 01

  So I loved it, but I thought I can love as well other things. But I understood how a collector's mind or heart is ticking. First of all, you have to be, you have to feel serious, you know, because especially with the comic books, adult people thought, okay, this is something for children or whatever, young adults. And that is not the case. I mean, of course, it was predominantly the group, but they have to feel safe in what they're doing. And that was later for me important, publishing,

• 2:56Speaker 01

  because I always tried to make it as appealing and serious and attractive as I could, that people could be careless and happy with their hobby, you know? That they did not have to hide it underneath, I don't know where, the carpet.

• 3:16Rick Rubin?

  What did the mailing list grow into?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  The mailing list, it was a basis for me to open this little store. It was like twenty-five square meters or thirty, like that's like three hundred square feet. And I had all the old comic books and as well new ones from, a lot from America, by the way, from the east, from the west coast, like Underground Comics.

• 3:39Rick Rubin?

  Zap.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Zap, yes, and the Freak Brothers.

• 3:43Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  And later as well came Raw Magazine by Art Spiegelman and many others. And now I thought there are some guys, because it was very male dominant, like ninety-nine percent of this whole comic book scene, at that time at least. I thought there are quite a number of outstanding artists and narrators, storytellers and...

• 4:16Speaker 01

  So I loved to get these publications, which were mainly done by small publishers from all over the world, and sell them in this little store. That was a novelty, and people loved it. They thought on top of this, I was a young boy, and I was still eighteen when I opened the store. The next day I turned nineteen. But I thought, it sounds much better biographically that I opened with eighteen. And they kind of loved to support me. That was nice as well to see.

• 4:51Rick Rubin?

  Were there any other comic book stores in Cologne?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  No, but there was nothing really in Germany as well. I think there was one in Berlin, yeah. And, you know, I had to get all these suppliers from Holland. I had to drive there all the time. And to Paris, to Belgium, and... But it was doing really well. And then I had fortune as well. I met a guy, Ludwig, was his name. And we kind of hit it off. And he became responsible for selling all this stuff, as well not to our bookstore we had, but as well to retailers in Germany and in Europe and in America.

• 5:35Rick Rubin?

  So you became like a wholesaler?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Became a wholesaler. And then we became wholesalers for illustrated books, yeah? And art books. And the big thing at that time was where remainders. So remainder is by definition, you know, an overstock a publisher can't get rid of. And that was something we started. And bought all the failures of other publishers for a dollar or a few dollars. And at one moment, that that was a changing point for at least my life. We could buy... An overstock of a book on René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist painter.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  And they had a big number, it was forty thousand copies. And I remember it cost one dollar. And but it was still forty thousand dollars. I mean, anyhow.

• 6:32Rick Rubin?

  And it was a book that it seemed like maybe nobody wanted because they had all these books that nobody wanted.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  The the main reason is people thought you cannot sell art books in a bigger edition of, I don't know, let's say like two thousand copies or so. And they have to be sold through specialty.

• 6:52Rick Rubin?

  Just collectors.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Stores. And I thought, well, why should that be the case? Because when I started, I always disliked the threshold of a certain store when you have books only behind covered behind glasses. So we thought if we can get rid of the threshold and as well if we can change the price so that people who are interested can easily buy it. And we had the price end at nine ninety five German marks with what was at that time, let's say like six, seven dollars. Once we did this, they flew out of the, not the shelf, but out of the stack. Yeah, and they did really super well. And that was the beginning.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  And it was still for an English language book. So we thought if this book is available in German, it might do even better in Germany. But to lower printing prices, we had to combine as well different languages together. I mean, in different versions, an English one, a German one, French and so on. So we had to translate all this stuff. We had no idea how to do this as well. Basically, we had no idea about anything, you know.

• 8:11Rick Rubin?

  And then when you translate it, would you do the same book in multiple editions? Or would you put all the translations in in one book?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  No, what we did is we had in different editions, you know, in different editions and.

• 8:26Rick Rubin?

  That makes it more complicated also in terms of stocking and.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:29Rick Rubin?

  How many depress.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  It definitely doesn't make it easier. But on the other hand, at that time, there was such, you know, a thirst for pictures, you know? And it was real novelty and the dead price, it was unbeatable and people. Just started to buy our books like crazy.

• 8:47Rick Rubin?

  What's the first book you published?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  The first book was a book on Dalí. And that was a book, we bought the rights from an English company. But then later, other book publishers, they didn't want to sell any licenses to us. Because they thought, these are crazy punks, or I don't know, they changed the entire market. And so they didn't really want to cooperate with us. So we had to do it on our own. And but we never did this, of course, and had no idea how to do it. But lucky, we had some editors who were wonderful from day one onwards. And we were able to do books, our own books, and in our own style.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  At least, that's how we we thought, we we how it should be. And this went very well. So we did small books and medium small ones, big ones and much bigger ones.

• 9:49Rick Rubin?

  Were all of the first books art books?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Well, they were all illustrated. Yes, they were all artist monographs. We did Dalí, Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, but let's say all the first household names. But very early on as well, we did some more specialties, we thought, which are interesting. At least, we thought so. And so we, that might be the case with others as well, that they like that. So since I had no formal education about anything. I remember I once asked the art historian professor, can you teach me? How to navigate around here? And I thought, yes, he could. But say, no, no, you have to do it all on your own. And I said, oh, fuck.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  But on the other hand, it was, I like the answer as well, you know? Because you have to do it on your own and otherwise, nobody can help you. I know later on that I always could ask people for this and that and that. But if you don't have your own initiative to do it, you cannot get a chip implemented in your brains that gives you knowledge on these and these and these unknown territories for you. So since we had no formal, I had no formal education and all the other punks working with me nor either, with a few exceptions, we brought everything in we thought is interesting.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  So, and a lot of this was, I remember when we did the first book on Tom of Finland in the 1980s. And I, I loved this stuff from the beginning on and I'm not gay. And I thought this guy is a very cultural, very significant person, artist. Because he took the guilt away from being, of being homosexual. So you see, you saw people who had fun in who they are and what are they doing. And on the other hand, it was just artistically wonderful done. When we did the first book on Tom of Finland, people thought we are really getting crazy here. Because it was maybe 1987.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  And I always thought, what's wrong? Why can't Tom of Finland not coexist next to Van Gogh and Monet and Gauguin and whomever, you know?

• 12:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Who decides this? But like 40 years ago, the world was in this way for sure different. There was a much stricter hierarchy, what is acceptable and what is in this artist canon or not. And if you cannot just bring somebody in and say he or she is in this circle. But since we had no idea about it and we thought differently, we easily could do it. And beside of this, I never cared about it as well.

• 12:51Rick Rubin?

  Have any of your books ever been banned?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Very, very rarely. I know that Hefner from Playboy, he said once to me about our books, "They can get away with murder, and for us, they attack us right away." Somehow, we were lucky all our, from the beginning onwards, that they let us live.

• 13:16Rick Rubin?

  But it sounds like you always presented everything within the context of, let's call it, fine art.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And so probably people were afraid saying, "Look, OK, if I do this, then I get in trouble with Leonardo and Michelangelo, and I look like a... I don't know, it doesn't make me look good." That's possible, yes. But beside of this, maybe it was just luck as well. I always felt like a lucky guy. And when I turned 30, I remember, like months before, I thought somehow I had this fixated idea that when I'm 30, my luck will leave me. And then I turned 30, and nothing happened. I mean, nothing bad happened. And then I thought, OK, maybe I just was fortunate to be born under a lucky star.

• 14:07Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  That was important for me for many reasons. Because, first of all, people who are successful, in my mind, far too often think that they are the ones who made it all happen because they worked so hard or had these great ideas. I doubt this. Of course, you have to work, and you have to work a lot.

• 14:32Rick Rubin?

  Yes. There was something you said earlier about the other comic collectors who are older than you, that they were trying to capture lost dreams of childhood.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:45Rick Rubin?

  Would you say the lost dreams of childhood might be a good way to describe Taschen books?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting thought.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yes, but probably not childhood only.

• 15:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  But maybe even dreams for grownups.

• 15:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  From my side, I was with childhood is like this. It was formative for me to be brought up in the nineteen sixties and seventies. You know, and I would be no way a different person if it would have happened ten years later or fifty years earlier, whatever, yeah. But the dreams in childhood are the ones which you will have all your life. Yeah. And hopefully they materialize or come true. And because nothing is said or than you see a grownup and none of the childhood dreams realized.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  You know. I think a driving force for me myself was certainly growing up as the fifth child of my parents. My older brother, he committed suicide when he was in his early twenties. And I was, it was a week before my tenth birthday. And that was, of course, a tragedy. You can't really deal with it, certainly not at a time like that. Because people did not really talk about stuff like that. It happened and then they moved on. And later it broke for sure my father's heart.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  This and maybe the Second World War both together. So I grew up, I became an adult pretty fast or certainly faster than others with a different fate. I dearly loved my parents, both my father and my mother. My father had a more closer relationship towards, although not that because he did a lot with me. That was not the case. But I always felt supported and loved by him. I never questioned this, and I never ever questioned this with my mother. So a lot what happened later, you know, I can see that it the first moment, let's say, the landing on the moon. We saw this together.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  And later, we did a book signed by Buzz Aldrin. Or I don't know whether it was the Rolling Stones or Beatles stuff, which happened in the 60s. So maybe I was stuck or still stuck in the early 1970s. So my mental development only partially grew, you know. So in a way, then my lost childhood dreams, I translated them into books somehow.

• 17:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  And at the same time, after my father died, he was unfortunately only like 60, 60 years old. And maybe I was looking as well for father's surrogates with all the people I had the luck to work with. People were a generation older than me. Yeah, or my parents' generation. And that was probably as well how to connect in a way with my father, who died early, and as well to connect with my German heritage. Because as you know, and for what happened, the one of the great tragedies,

• 18:35Speaker 01

  that all what made Germany sophisticated, interesting, was eroded. Either people were killed or they emigrated. And somehow, maybe I had to pick up the traces of the emigres all over the world and put a part of their story into books. I don't know whether that makes sense. And maybe that's the reason as well why I came to California. Maybe it was, you know, like a drive, like a, let's say, like a, like a salesman has, to go back in the circle of a life

• 19:19Speaker 01

  to a place where they had no idea that they come from there.

• 19:22Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  So I am a Californian German salesman.

• 19:29Rick Rubin?

  I love the idea of looking for the wise elders to to guide you, it sounds like.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Yes, you know what was wonderful, growing up in my parents' house, you know, we had always a big, a wonderful, wide mix of characters there, including people, some artists and writers, but as well just my family's, all traces, all walks of life in a way. And I was exposed to adults from being a little child. So we never had, see, that's these are the children, these are the adults. It was all mixed together. So I loved old people from the beginning on as much as I loved young ones, but the older ones had more interesting stuff to talk about.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Because they had a life already and the others had maybe nothing or just a playground or a soccer ball or whatever, yeah? So I never cared, I was, I'm happy that I was exposed to old people when I was super young.

• 20:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  And the best reward was, I remember this with some artists as well, when they treated you not as a child, but treated you as an adult.

• 20:46Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was even cooler because then

• 20:52Speaker 01

  it meant you were taken serious, you know?

• 20:58Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about Cologne.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Cologne, old Cologne, Cologne, historically, most northern colony of the Roman Empire. That's where the name comes from. But it's important as well because Cologne was from the beginning on a mix of different people. This case, the Romans, the Germans. And so it was always a much more open city. Later, the French were there for a while. And this kind of gave an imprint on the Cologne DNA, so.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  You know, in Germany, we have like seventeen different states are in Germany. And they are all quite different from each other. They speak as well, not a different language, but a different dialect. And when you hear the dialects, they are profoundly different from the, let's say, east in Germany to the south in Bavaria. So, growing up in Cologne for me was wonderful. It was a city with little less than a million people. And we were lucky in Cologne that after the war, it was very heavily destroyed. There was the WDR, that was Westdeutscher Rundfunk.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  And this radio station was quite influential as well for American, or music in general. Because all the great, not only classical musicians, but as well all jazz musicians, came to Cologne to record. And this from the 1950s onwards. Then there were some other, there was a Fotokina, which was a fair for photography, starting in the early 1950s. And there were a couple of collectors, or big collectors, for pop art in the 1960s. So, there are a couple of cultural players coming together.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  And that probably created the ground that Cologne was for about maybe ten, fifteen years, not the epicenter of the world, but at least for Europe and contemporary art, it was one of the few important cities. Because it was kind of rundown, the people were welcoming, and rents were cheap. So, all what is necessary, the fertile ground. And, as you know, there are some people coming, or they attract others like a magnet, you know? Specifically artists, they usually, or some kind of artists, they are not alone, they...

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Have their own stellar system around them. And if you have one or two, it's easy. Then you have twenty or thirty or fifty. And that creates this and then later they are gone somewhere else. So it's nothing forever.

• 24:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  But in the seventies and eighties, it is fair to say that probably all great visual artists in the world showed there at least once, twice or several times. When I started the publishing house in nineteen eighty, all the great shows popped up just literally in front of our house there. Whether that was Cindy Sherman or Mike Kelly, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wuhl, Albert Ölen, Kippenberger. So this generation definitely had this foundation for a while in Cologne and of course then in New York.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, Cologne was wonderful to me because as a young boy, there was a tram, I could move around freely and I was not monitored. I mean, at that time, parents did not monitor their children anyhow, I think. It was not only for me, but they gave me the that gave me the impression that they believed in me and it was less work for them. My father always said, a good child educates itself. Which I took this, like many other things from my father as well. In my education, skills, the limited ones. On the other hand, it's of course far less work, I have to say.

• 25:44Rick Rubin?

  Would you say passion lives outside of the rest of the publishing industry? In that if you look at the percentage of books that are selling and if the whole industry is going down, does that affect you the same way or different?

• 26:00Speaker 01

  We are outsiders, not because we want to be an outsider.

• 26:03Rick Rubin?

  He just died.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  It just happened. I don't, I only know a handful of colleagues. And I was never in any organizations or spending my time in, on behalf of the whatever. We did what we thought is right or we thought would make sense. Whether that worked out in the end, there's a second question. But we are not organized in whatever book trade categories.

• 26:41Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the first Sumo book.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  I can tell you about the first sumo was Helmut Newton. And I loved since I was a young man, Helmut Newton. Helmut Newton was born in Berlin. Jewish family, his real name was Helmut Neustädter. He changed it when he emigrated to Australia in the 1930s from Berlin in 36. So I loved Helmut Newton. And I tried to get in contact with him for many years, starting already in the 1980s. And in the 1980s, I met him and he was always very welcoming and friendly to me, but looked at me like kind of skeptical.

• 27:28Rick Rubin?

  How much older we see than you?

• 27:31Speaker 01

  I can tell you, he is exactly, he was born in 1921. And he's 40 years older. And of course, he represented, I mean, it was an entirely different world. And but...

• 27:51Speaker 01

  I met him in Berlin in the nineteen eighties. And at that time, I thought, Mr. Newton, could we do bed sheets with the big nudes? That was what he just started. And he said, "That's an interesting idea." "Send me samples." And we made samples, but we had no idea how to do it. And it looked awful. It looked like, I couldn't show it. And I was too embarrassed.

• 28:16Rick Rubin?

  But the idea was to do bed sheets?

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Yes. But the reason why was, I know that he had a gallery for his prints or different galleries. I had a publisher for his books. And somehow, I thought, "How can I get into this?" And have to do something he likes as well. Anyhow, that didn't work at all, but we stayed in contact. That was, so we were on speaking terms at least. But then later, I thought that his photos, when they are in a bigger size or in a big size, they get a life in a different way. And I made a sample in this sumo size. We called it sumo.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Had no other reference than the sumo fighters, these big guys. And...

• 29:06Rick Rubin?

  It's about three feet by four feet, something like this?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Depends on the length of the feet. Ah, feet, yes, American feet.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  It is fifty by seventy centimeters, which is, yeah, a couple of feet, yeah, high, you know. And we had this sample, the dummy done. And he was in Los Angeles, staying in the wintertime at the Chateau Marmont. And I asked him to come over to the Sunset Marquis Hotel, because I didn't want to carry this big thing. He came over and he was in awe. We did it in a way, he brought his wife, June. And I had to be smart. On the second page, there's a beautiful portrait of June Newton by Helmut.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  When she opened it, they both laughed as well, they understood it. So, but the reason why I knew at that time that if there's a, let's say, Helmut and June Newton, if you really want to work with Helmut, you have to work at the same time with June. And that was many artist couples the same. You can't have a good relationship to one only, it will not work out well. Yes. But it was a pleasure to work with her anyhow, and she was a great editor. So they saw all of this, and they said, "Helmut," oh, Mr. Newton, I was always on, uh, on terms with him, I said, "Herr Newton, we can do this and this, we have 10,000 copies,

• 30:38Speaker 01

  if you can sign them all, uh, you, I can give you, offer you this amount of money." It had to have a certain numbers of zeros, yeah?

• 30:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  That he makes him, uh...

• 30:52Rick Rubin?

  Get his attention.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Get his attention.

• 30:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Because he was at that time the biggest name in the world, not only in photography, he was one of the big artists everyone knew worldwide.

• 31:05Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  So, and then I definitely thought I have to get to work with this man, because I admire him, number one, and second, it will do really well. So he trusted me. From there on, it was very difficult to get this as well produced in a way that, because he was at that time 80 years old, and I was, I don't know, whatever, 35, 40, and, uh, his risk was enormous, because if you do a big book, which is a big failure, and as well looks like a big piece of S H I T, that does not help you when you are at your height of a career.

• 31:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  And for no reason you do this. So anyhow, he trusted me and it worked for... It took a couple of years that we made it work. And then fortunately, it became as well for him, a milestone in his artistic life.

• 32:04Rick Rubin?

  The book was a news story.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Yes, no doubt.

• 32:08Rick Rubin?

  And that's rare to create that much interest.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  I mean, we did not invent the big oversized books because they have a history going back 500 years. But somehow, at least, we tried to make it work. It's a state-of-the-art production at that time.

• 32:22Rick Rubin?

  And you even created a table for the book to live with.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Yes, that was another difficult design issue. And I know at that time, Helmut Newton, Philip Stark did the design. He was not happy with the design, but to bring them together. In the end, we wanted to make it look lighter than it was. Light, I mean, lightweight.

• 32:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Kind of floating. And I think Stark did a great, fantastic design on this. And it worked out very well, and it was a huge success for us. And through Helmut, who I became very close then in later years, he was kind enough to bring me together with all his friends. And he had friends from all walks of life, everywhere in the world. And that was wonderful for me and very helpful for all other books we did later.

• 33:26Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the psychology of book sizes. So you have books that are, I'll call them coffee table book size. Then you have small books that are very thick. And then you have books like Sumo, giant books.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, we always believed in formats. That means the ratio between length and width and thickness. And of course as well, how the paper is, what kind of paper you have, the color and the texture, how it's haptically in your hands.

• 34:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  And that takes a long time. To produce a perfect product. And once you have it, then better keep it and go ahead with it.

• 34:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Because it's not easy to have this reinvented. We have all kinds of sizes, very small ones, very big ones. But they all have to have an equilibrium that they look like they are designed to be like this. If you just inflate something that it's overly big, it just doesn't work. I mean, it works for a second, but not longer. And with the sumo, that was, yeah, that was in a way a novelty. And we kind of perfectly hit it off.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  And it became one of the, certainly, our most successful book we ever had, you know? Or at least our most popular, famous one.

• 35:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:10Rick Rubin?

  I've seen that the first edition sold for over $400,000 at auction.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Yes, what we did was the idea and we succeeded, thankfully. We did the first copy was signed by about 100 people who were portrayed in the book. And this was auctioned in the year 2000 in Berlin. And it became the most expensive book published in the 20th century.

• 35:41Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  And yeah, from there on, we were the happy kids. And could not believe our luck. But you know, you never know how stuff works till you did it, you know?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Does it sound very smart? No.

• 36:04Rick Rubin?

  Do you ever do multiple formats? Like, do you ever release a book big and then release it small?

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Oh, all the time. That's the whole, that's definitely the concept of the, our publishing idea. Because we put a lot of time, money, and passion into, in every big production. And we only can do it because we want to see the same book in print for the next ten, twenty, or fifty years.

• 36:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  So we have a lot of books which are now forty years old in our program. And of course, we update them and so. But if we would not make the smaller versions later, because the big versions have more or less an unlimited budget. So we spend or pay what we think is worth to do. And we don't make a lot of calculations upfront. We just put in what we need. And to make it work, you have to have it for long. It needs a long, long shelf life.

• 37:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  But beside of this, you know, once you did a book on, let's say, the complete paintings of Van Gogh, there is no change ten years later, twenty years later, unless there's another

• 37:20Rick Rubin?

  Discovery.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Painting discovered or so. But basically, it is what it is.

• 37:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Therefore, we like to do it once, then it's done, you know?

• 37:33Rick Rubin?

  You did a book, I believe it's called Apartment House Wrestling. Do you know what that is?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Definitely. I didn't know before, but now I do know. There was a German photographer, his name was Theo Irrett. He lived in Los Angeles. I mean, he was there for decades already. And that he covered a kind of a niche market subject. It was apartment wrestling. And a friend of mine, the artist, two artists from California, Mike Kelly and Jamie Cameron, they suggested me to look into his work. So I visited him in Silver Lake about twenty-five years ago.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  And he was surprised that somebody is seriously interested in this stuff. I said, "No, I really wanna, I would like to see this." They had a, you know, you can see a photographer, what kind of, you see right away it is a composition. How can they deal with light and put it all together? And this guy definitely knew what he was doing, although the subject was so less than marginal. And I thought, "That is admirable. How can somebody spend years of his life doing girls' apartment wrestling photos?" And so we thought, "We have to make a big book with this guy."

• 39:03Speaker 01

  The title was Exquisite Mayhem.

• 39:06Rick Rubin?

  Was it well received?

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Well, let's put that as a relative. I know some friends, for instance, Bruce Weber, told me, "Okay, a guy who does a book like this, he has to be a respected man," or whatever.

• 39:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  And I thought, "Bruce, that is very kind of you that you said that, especially if it comes from you." And, but otherwise, it was selling not at all. I think it was rarely sold for many years. But we loved each and every book we printed.

• 39:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  And after a while, we got rid of all of them as well. Yeah.

• 39:46Rick Rubin?

  Maybe it was too early.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Well, maybe too late. Who knows? Ah, I can tell you, Helmut Newton again, story. We did, two years later, we did, he started this big book on Muhammad Ali called Goat: Greatest of All Time. And I met him through his manager, Bernie Hume, from Las Vegas. Wonderful man, and maybe the only manager I loved from the first day onwards. Because usually, we always deal only direct with talent. And so Bernie, I told him, "Okay, I have to send him one of these big Helmut Newton Zuma books that he understands."

• 40:29Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  The scale of it and so. And I didn't think too much about it, so I had him send this copy. And Bernie, who was never really short of words, but that time he called me and said, Benedict, tell me what Ali just called me. And he said, why did this guy Taschen send me a book with a big naked white woman on the cover to me as a Muslim? And Bernie said, what should I tell him now? And I thought, okay Bernie, well, tell him he just got it wrong. So these were just, women have no money for clothes, you know? Poor women.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  And that's how it happened. I said, okay, I do this. So I called, he called him. And Ali was laughing and then he was happy. And because he had to sign 10,000 books.

• 41:25Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  And that took him a while, you know?

• 41:29Rick Rubin?

  Did you get to meet him personally?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, often, very often.

• 41:32Rick Rubin?

  How was that relationship?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, it was most amazing because he was, for me, being a child growing up in the 1960s, I used to watch with my family, with my father, mother and siblings. These were the first live cast sports events in the world. So in Germany, it was in the middle of the night and we saw these quite a number of the fights. And he was always one of my great inspirations and heroes.

• 42:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  And that was a big thing for me, the first time I met him. And we really wanted to make it work in a way that he does not need me or he doesn't need a book because he is Muhammad Ali. But on the other hand, we put more probably into this book than into any other book. And we tried, I visited dozens of photographers all over the world and here in America. And anyhow, with Ali, that was wonderful because he was, first time he saw the book, he said, I didn't know that I was so great.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  And, no, it was wonderful. He, it was, he loved it and it was more than well received all over the world. It was definitely a labor of love.

• 43:00Rick Rubin?

  Do you print in one place and then ship books everywhere? Or do you print in different countries?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  It depends on the formats, but the more, there's bigger books, let's say, like this Ali book or the Newton. This is mainly done, printed in Italy and we have our own bindery for oversized books in Italy because it's such a specialty. You need certain equipment for this.

• 43:23Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  And more or less, nobody can do this in the world. So we have our own book binding company. Yeah, so Ali, that was very rewarding for us as well because, you know, a guy who had everything in the world and all the unbelievable ups and downs and ups again and downs and not up. And he was happy like a little child. That was the most rewarding part of it, you know, to make him happy. And I think as well, if you see the book today or in, I don't know, fifty years from now.

• 43:58Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  People will say, wow, who was this guy? Man.

• 44:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  What a life, yeah?

• 44:05Rick Rubin?

  What was the first cinema book that you put out?

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Oh, we did a couple, but the first important one, I thought, which was really looking different from other movie books, it was Billy Wilder on Some Like It Hot. And Billy Wilder was one of the directors I really loved because not only he was a missing link for me, generations, two generations ahead of me, from Germany, who emigrated to America in the thirties and became one of the most successful and important directors ever. I met him in the nineteen nineties in Los Angeles and...

• 44:52Speaker 01

  By the way, through the introduction of Helmut Newton, kind enough, like he always was. And somehow, whenever I was in Los Angeles, I saw him a couple of times a week. He was a wonderful man. He, you know, he had eyes and ears to listen and see stuff others won't. You know, like, how can I describe it? And he always had this very human touch in whatever he did, whether it was drama, comedy, or, you know, film noir. But it always had this wilder touch. So when we, when I suggested him to do this book on Something Like It Hot, he was very curious and said, yes, great.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  He was already in his early nineties at that time.

• 45:38Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  But very helpful he was. We were able to talk with more or less everyone who was still alive, who participated in the movie. Yeah, I would say the Something Like It Hot book was the first. And then we did the first book on Stanley Kubrick. Unfortunately, when the book came out, he was, he passed away already. Kubrick, in the meantime, we did another four or five different other ones on individual movies like The Shining. We did 2001. And on Napoleon, that was the most famous movie never made. Was never realized.

• 46:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me about the Chemosphere House.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  The Chemosphere House. I didn't really know about the Chemosphere House. What I did know was a picture by Julius Schulman. It's kind of a profile picture of the house in the hillside overlooking the valley. And I said, wow, I want to see it right away. So the next day. I drove by and I was in awe because it's such an incredible sculpture. Or let's say, an expression of America. Like an innocent America before the Vietnam War.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  So it is very flamboyant and you won't see anything like this in the rest of the world. So I definitely, I would say, I fall in love with the house on the site. And I said, I buy it. And it was nine hundred ninety-five thousand dollars.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Minor detail was only that I didn't have, that I didn't have the money. So, but I said, yes, I buy it anyhow. So I bought it. And later I had to buy two pieces of art from my collection to make it work. But from there on, it started to become really costly because you had to renovate it. And it needed really love and attention. And I had the great luck that I could work with a Swiss Mexican architect, Frank Escher and his partner Ravi. And they were very knowledgeable about Lautner.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  So he worked with him for a while before he passed. So and we restored it for three, four years. And it, I was really fortunate because most people, architects, who restore houses have no clue what they're doing. Because especially in America, they love restorations which look very sleek. But if it's sleek, that in the end, you ripped out the soul of the house. And if it's gone, it's gone. The same with furniture or with cars or whatever you restore. But they were different. They want to preserve what they could preserve and only change, which had a reason for it already in the past.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  So and then later they won as well the prize for the best restoration of a house in America from this year ninety-seven or ninety-eight. But the funny thing was, there was later Matt Groening. You know, in the nineties, he had a show, a Simpsons show. And it starts with a chemistry house and a crooked for sale sign. It hangs like halfway down and it's full of spider webs because nobody bought the house over the years. Anyhow, I'm happy it was kind of getting married to the house. And over the years, we could buy some adjacent

• 49:33Speaker 01

  pieces of land and to other houses. And so now we have around the Chemist's House, a whole hill of gardens.

• 49:43Rick Rubin?

  How's the experience of living in that house?

• 49:46Speaker 01

  It's a masterpiece. Whenever you, whenever I'm there or sleep there or just visiting, I can see that it's done in a unique moment of time. And it was a combination of, you know, the guy who built it, the builder. He wasn't, I think, an airplane engineer. So he was very open to new ideas. And the reason why it is built like it is, you know, it sits on a massive concrete column, which goes like 25 feet in the ground is because it was such a steep hillside.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Otherwise, it would have been not buildable. You had to excavate the whole thing. No, it's wonderful. I mean, this house showed me what architecture can do, how it can change your life as well, in this case to the Gruch.

• 50:48Rick Rubin?

  When you take on a topic to do a book on, let's say, case study houses.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:56Rick Rubin?

  Do you feel an obligation to tell the whole story?

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Yes. Once we are in it, we are in there. And the case study houses is a great example.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  For me, because I knew a little bit about some of these architects. The most famous ones like Neutra or Eames. But that was a whole range, altogether, maybe a dozen of these architects. It started, there was a magazine in Los Angeles published called Arts and Architecture by a guy named, I think, Richard Entenza. And he started after, it started in nineteen forty-five after the war. And there was housing need in California, specifically in California. Let's put it this way, from homecoming soldiers.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  And on top of this, all America was booming like never before. And one critical issue, of course, was homes for these people. And they started competition, it was basic, not a competition, but something like this, with these case study houses, how to make industrial materials which can be produced at a much better price. How can you use it for contemporary architecture, homes building? So these case study houses, it was very influential, but it did not lead to a kind

• 52:32Speaker 01

  of a mass market for these homes, because in the end they were kind of still expensive. But it was a wonderful idea. This modernist architecture at that time was highly influential in a way that it was, it represented a future-believing, optimistic America. At that time, even before the Korean War, yeah? And this was the expression of modernism.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  And the Case Study House, I think altogether they were about twenty-five. When we did our book, the only available publication over, I don't know, it was forty years backwards at that time. I was a little pamphlet with few pages, but really nothing. At the same time, by a contemporary photographer illustrated, his name is Julius Schulman. And without Julius Schulman, he was kind of the memory of modernism, so to say. He photographed all these buildings and made them look even better than they ever were, in some cases.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  So we did this Case Study House book. And we made with the museum, I think with the Moca in Los Angeles, an event maybe twenty years ago. And we still, at that time, were like seven or eight living Case Study House architects there. So that was pretty amazing, because they were, in a way, most of them were forgotten as well.

• 54:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's a beautiful book. I love the wide format.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, but without Julius Schulman, no way that we could have done it. That was definitely one of the many highlights I had, thanks God, visiting and meeting with Julius Schulman. He was born on ten, ten, ten. I remember this because he said it repeatedly, and it sounded easy to remember.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  And when I came to see his house in the Hollywood Hills, it was definitely like a time tunnel back in nineteen forty-eight or whatever. He was a wonderful, warm and humorous guy. And when I asked him, do you have something we can do together? And he said, yes, I'm just finishing my memoirs. And I said, OK, well, I'm happy to do this with you. And that was the beginning of our collaboration and, in this case as well, our friendship.

• 55:25Rick Rubin?

  How many books did you do with him?

• 55:28Speaker 01

  We did maybe four or five, yeah.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  But we used his photos in many of other architecture publications. Like all the great photographers, he created his own style. What made his photos difference beside of dramatic lighting and composition? He was, it sounds funny, but that is the case. He was the first photographer in architecture who introduced the human being into the humans into the picture. Nobody else did it. It's funny, but.

• 56:03Rick Rubin?

  But when you have a human in the picture, you understand scale.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Not only scale, you understand the whole, it gives you, architecture is made for humans, yeah?

• 56:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  But the funny thing is that architects usually didn't like it. Somehow it was like this, that the pictures you see, you saw them deserted, like no human ever put a foot on the ground there, yeah? And Julius not only had one, but as well groups interacting. And as you say, of course, that's the only way to understand proportion and the size of all of it. And it makes it more human.

• 56:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and it also, the clothing stamps it with a date.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  And all his photos, his photography was classically elegant throughout. And without Julius, something would miss in this second part of the 20th century.

• 57:08Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your relationship to books from childhood.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  My parents had a lot of books in their house and I grew up reading since I was a young boy. One reason why I was, I was often alone because I was the youngest out of five. And they let me be myself. And so my books were my friends early on. I read a lot of books as well, probably not appropriate for the age group, like Henry Miller or so. And because I just took books out of the shelf and this and that. But others as well were, I started, I read all Jules Verne books.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  And later I read a lot of American writers, like.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Up Sinclair or John Steinbeck or Raymond Chandler, Bukowski and so on. So I was definitely a bookworm. Not that I didn't go out or so, this I did plentiful, yeah. But I loved to read early on.

• 58:22Rick Rubin?

  And when did your love of comic books come?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  That came later, when I read already a ton of books when I was maybe 12. And by coincidence it happened, I read the German Mickey Mouse magazine had as well. It was not just Mickey Mouse, it was the Duck Family. And I liked always the Duck Family. Actually, that was the only thing I liked. The rest I was not interested in. And I found out Disney never allowed the artists to neither copyright nor sign who made the drawings or the narration, the storytelling. But one was profoundly different from all the other ones. Later I found out his name was Carl Barks.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  And he is kind of the creator of the Duck Family. With Uncle Scrooge, Donald, the nephews and everything.

• 59:18Rick Rubin?

  Donald Duck and his offspring.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Yes. He was not only an amazing storyteller, but as well as an artist. So but I have never seen it anywhere else. And his stories, I loved them from the beginning on. And I can say that I probably learned everything, at least I thought, at that time about America, California, Southern California and capitalism. This is the cause of Carl Barks, Donald Duck. I think he started in the mid 40s and did it for 25 years or whatever. And that was how I fell in love with comic books, or specifically with this guy.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Later I found out that there were others in the world who did the same. And he had already a much growing fan base, Carl Barks. But unfortunately, beside of this comic book fan club circle.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Where he was a big star already forty years ago or so, fifty years ago. He never became a household name, but he was inspirational for generations of children. And I mean, he is as great a writer as Mark Twain is, I would say, you know? Or any other household great name. And without Karl Bax, my life would have gone in a different direction. I'm pretty sure about that.

• 1:00:55Rick Rubin?

  Let's say there's a subject that you're interested in. It could be a photographer for the past that you've come across, or an architect whose work you liked. Tell me the process. You have the idea, this is a subject worthy of doing a book.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Rick Rubin?

  What happens next?

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  We usually work always with the artist directly, whether the artist or photographer or designer, so.

• 1:01:23Rick Rubin?

  And if the artist has passed?

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Well, then it's more difficult to work with him directly. So you have to directly with his spirit.

• 1:01:33Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, or in his spirit.

• 1:01:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  No, we kind of, what I want to say is we are, we feel as if we take on this job to do this.

• 1:01:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  It's a commitment and we just try to make the best out of it. And that's a close collaboration. We never do anything against someone, but only with someone.

• 1:01:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  And we, you know, we are respectful. Yeah, you know, we, the goal is to get the best result. And the second goal is of course to sell as much as we can. Yeah, because I always liked to sell, you know? If you don't sell, then you're out of business, yeah? Then nobody.

• 1:02:15Rick Rubin?

  And it also doesn't spread the art. Like if the goal is to turn people on to this great artist.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  For a few years, I was kind of a vote in, I was still in school, but I was in a vaudeville theatre for a few years. And why did I do it? I had fun doing it, but if you don't get applause, then you're kind of fucked, you know? I mean.

• 1:02:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  And that's the same, if you don't, if you make a book and nobody buys it, and that happens all the time.

• 1:02:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter when it happens a few times, but if it happens all the time, constantly.

• 1:02:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Then maybe you better do something else, you know.

• 1:02:53Rick Rubin?

  Are there any books that would be too dangerous to publish?

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  I would say maybe the one of the dangerous books we did is, at least for certain parts of the world, like in China, we worked with as a public enemy number one and number two, close. One is the Dalai Lama and the second one is A I Y Y. And they definitely did not like this at all. And but what can we do? I mean, I'm an admirer of China and of whatever 4,000 years of history. But that doesn't say that we can't do what we want to do, you know.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  And for the Dalai Lama, it was when we did this book on the murals of Tibet. It was, you know, keeping a record of this world heritage people don't know about because it's hidden in the middle of the highest mountains in the world. And the lot was destroyed by Chinese. If it was not destroyed, it was not supported anymore and then it fall apart. So art or what we are doing, if people think it's dangerous, they might be right because the artists, they do what they want. And otherwise, they wouldn't be artists, you know.

• 1:04:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  So and our heart or our support is hundred percent behind the artist, nothing else. First comes the artist and second comes the buyer. Yeah. And everything else is only personal stuff you can't forget about.

• 1:04:40Rick Rubin?

  It's a direct communication between the artist and the person interested in the artist. Everything else is noise.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  I fully agree with this.

• 1:04:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  I mean, I have no doubt at all that this is the, at least for us, the only way how to, what makes us work, yeah, or what should make us work, you know.

• 1:05:00Rick Rubin?

  Do you think of Taschen as a counterculture publishing house?

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Look, we did a lot of counterculture over the years. And I can say, yes, it's certainly the substantial part of what we did. I have to explain it in a way. This is always changing. How the reception is what is counterculture and what is mainstream.

• 1:05:27Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  That is nothing new. I think it was always like this.

• 1:05:31Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  It has to do with time, but as well with fashion. It happened to the greatest painter in the world. Let's say Fermé. You know, Fermé was entirely forgotten for many, many years. And then, I don't know when it started, in the late 19th century, people started to get interested in him, in his work. And he did only, I don't know, 35 paintings or so. But he was generally forgotten for decades or centuries. And he is not the only one who shared this fate. So counterculture and culture, this is always in limbo. You know, you cannot.

• 1:06:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's counterculture until it gets popular enough to become mainstream.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it definitely had as well an advantage. There is an advantage if you have no prejudice because you have no knowledge, you know.

• 1:06:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Yeah, you don't know what you don't know.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  You have eyes and ears to form your own opinion or something.

• 1:06:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  And I was in a way forced to do this. And on the other hand, I really liked as well this counterculture, always.

• 1:06:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. What was the first Passion Bookstore since you've been Passion Books?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  The first real bookstore we did was in Paris, in Saint-Germain. We did it in the late 1990s. We worked together with a great French designer, Philippe Stark. And he loved our books, our program. Because, you know, the main part of our books is to democratize books in a way that they are easier, accessible, and at different price points available. But he wanted to create a design around it, which looks...

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  Kind of inviting, but on the other hand, it looks very precious as well. And so we still have this door unaltered for twenty-five or long more years now. And it's always a great pleasure to see it, how he did it long time ago.

• 1:07:50Rick Rubin?

  And how many stores are there now around the world?

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Oh, we have maybe fifteen.

• 1:07:56Rick Rubin?

  What percentage of the books that you put out are part of a series versus standalone books?

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Well, they're in a way standalone books, but on the other hand, they are in a format which is a series where we have already, let's say with the basic art books, we have already hundred fifty others or so, you know?

• 1:08:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  So they're all alone. Yeah, monographs. They're on their own, standing alone, but there are many others in the same

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  series, you know?

• 1:08:27Rick Rubin?

  Do you do many books that are rooted in fashion?

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Oh, we did a lot with fashion designers. There was Pissy Mejake or Valentino, Karl Lagerfeld we did, and a couple of others, Pucci. Not the most substantial part of our program, but we have quite a number. Oh, recently, of course, over the last years, more street or young designers like Virgil Abloh. We did, it was one of the best-selling titles we had over the last couple of years.

• 1:09:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. How about posters?

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  The posters, we're gonna do a couple of more poster books in the works. Before photography came up, and that was maybe, let's say, in the nineteen fifty's, yeah? The poster was, of course, the art form.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Not only to advertise, but as well to, if you have movie posters.

• 1:09:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  It was a genre, how you advertised your products. And since there was no photography, everything was painted. It was a much more artistic work involved, yeah. So these posters are pretty remarkable. And once you see them, I fall in love with them. It started all more or less with the Art Nouveau and the end of the 19th century, when these printing machines were invented. Yeah, I love this stuff.

• 1:10:07Rick Rubin?

  Are you ever surprised by which books sell or don't sell?

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  Yes, because it is not predictable.

• 1:10:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  We don't do marketing that we first check, is this something people are looking forward? Or what might people think about this and that? We don't operate like this, not that we're not interested in it. I think it's simply not possible. How can we know what five billion people might think? I don't even know what your neighbor thinks, or me myself, you know? Of course, we ask people and just always a handful or couple of people say, what do you think about this and that? But you can do this only very selected. And as more people you ask, as more opinions you get, and as more work you have. If you feel yourself good with it, then the likelihood that it works,

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  at least from the product side here, or artistically from design, then it's very likely that others think the same.

• 1:11:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Unless the subject is such a marginal one, that no one, whatever you do, and how beautifully you do it. And how much a standard it is, it can't be successful because it's just too small a potential audience.

• 1:11:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  But what it is exactly, I have no idea. I don't know. That's a mystery and that's kind of fun as well that it stays like this. It's not that it's entirely unpredictable. I wouldn't go so far, but there are always titles which are doing so much better than others and if you would have known before, then everybody else would do it anyhow.

• 1:11:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Can you think of a book that you had high hopes for, but for whatever reason didn't connect with the audience?

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, some of these books, it is, it's not unexpected because we knew it is a very limited audience. Let's say the apartment wrestling book, Female, yeah? We had a similar case with photographer, his name was Elmar Betas and he was, his love was foot and leg photography.

• 1:12:25Rick Rubin?

  Like fetish photography?

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, whatever, I mean, that was his, what he photographed, feet and leg.

• 1:12:31Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  So, and he lived in San Pedro and leg language, your kind of talk, that was his.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I visited his home and I knew all a number of his photos in these different magazines. And, but a lot of these photos he did at his, in his home, yeah, and on his terrace there and all was. So I, it was kind of, I got very close to him and I really loved this guy and I loved it, but no matter what the subject is, I just love it and people have an extraordinary drive for fun to do something very specific, yeah? And no matter what it is, yeah?

• 1:13:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's interesting when someone is focused on something that no one else is focusing on.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, or let's say at least very few others.

• 1:13:32Rick Rubin?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he was the king of leg photography, so to say. The same with a guy like Eric Stanton. Eric Stanton, he was a comic book artist. But as well, he was, his key, main subject was the dominant women. Eric Stanton, of I think Russian origin, or the parents, they came to New York in the nineteen thirties or twenties. And when I, I knew some of his comic books, they were all very kind of kinky erotic ones. And we made a big book out of this, and he was touched in tears, so to say.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  And I know that he had tons of followers over the years, all over the world, yeah. But there was never a big manifest of his work. And for sure, nobody really took it serious. But it is serious, and you know, first of all, if you embrace your fantasies, this alone is the first step to make something special. And that you're not feeling guilty that you have this fetish or that or this. It doesn't matter, and he translated it in his works and his drawings in a way nobody else, at least to my knowledge, did. It requires some respect if somebody is doing it.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Let's say you go to a restaurant and somebody really puts a lot into the meal, yeah, whatever. You should be respectful, don't ask, okay, can I have this with ketchup and this? That's not what you do, you know? I mean, you can do it, but you make a fool out of yourself.

• 1:15:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  And I think if you see there's an extraordinary work in something, you have to be respectful and treat it like this, yeah?

• 1:15:33Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your relationship with National Geographic and how did it come about?

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  Oh, we were asked, it was, it was an anniversary coming up. It was the hundred twenty-five years of National Geographic. And as you know, that was always the magazine, probably for quite some time as well, with the largest circulation in the world. And they did a remarkable job always in, they spent more money into their assignments than anybody else. People, photographers and writers were working for months or sometimes years on a story. And in the end, it only, you know, in the magazine, you had like ten pages or five or fifteen, if it was.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  So we thought, how can we make best use of this unique archive? And so we came up with a concept, Around the World with National Geographic in Hundred Twenty-Five Years. To this point, it is definitely one of my favorite books we did. Because first of all, we had this amazing archive and we had access to everything we wanted to do, have. And at that time, quite a number of these photographers were still alive as well. Once they saw the final book, they were, I remember at least three of them were in tears

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  because it was the first time that their work was seen in a different way and a different scale as well on top of this. Because National Geographic, as you know, is pretty small.

• 1:17:14Rick Rubin?

  Small scale. Based on that experience, are there other great libraries of information out there that are just waiting for you to?

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, there's always something. We've just finished a book on the archives of Life magazine.

• 1:17:31Rick Rubin?

  Fantastic.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  That was only on Hollywood.

• 1:17:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  And we were very happy with the final result in this. Because the material to start with is so vast already. And then you have to go through the individual. Files and I knew how these files looked like when we were working on the goat greatest of all time. Our lead book, I saw at least, I don't know, twenty different archives. And one of the biggest ones was as well here with Life magazine and Sports Illustrated. It was all the same company at that time, Time Life. And so the photographers, when they were assigned to a job, let's say, to photograph Humphrey Bogart in for on Africa Green and somewhere it's filmed in Africa.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  There was one file with all the contact sheets. But then as well, the photographers had to write captions to each of the frames as well. Yeah, in the end, in the magazine, they used maybe one picture or two or none. Yeah.

• 1:18:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  And what was seen at that time as the best one or the most print worthy is not necessary today. Uh, we wouldn't probably agree with it, so we would choose something else.

• 1:18:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  But that is a lot of work and you only can do it from time to time because it's really tiring.

• 1:19:00Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  To do it right. And that was the same with National Geographic and Life. We are happy, very happy that we could do this together with them. And I think that the result was what we finally got. But it's very tiring many years of work.

• 1:19:19Rick Rubin?

  Have you done any collections of magazines bound?

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, we did a couple of reprints. That's like on Dormoz magazine, a lot of, we did a couple of interior and architecture ones.

• 1:19:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Dormoz magazine and Arts and Architecture, this American magazine based in Los Angeles. And a few other ones. Uh, we did a six volume series on the history of men's magazines. It starts in the late nineteen hundreds and it stops maybe in the nineteen seventies or so. Yeah. Uh, it's funny that we did it, but yeah.

• 1:20:04Rick Rubin?

  Have you done comic book compilations?

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, we did a number of reprints now, big and a large size. A new one is coming up now on Tarzan by two excellent artists. One called Hell Foster and Bern Hogarth. And we did Little Nemo and Crazy Cat. And we are doing Marvel and EC Comics. And yeah, we have a, we're getting a very substantial comic book program. So it's coming after forty or plus years back to the roots.

• 1:20:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  And what I liked, I'm very excited about it. Because we know by now how we can do it, that it looks as good as it would have looked if the technology and the money put into this at the time when it was published. Yeah, if it could have been done this way.

• 1:21:03Rick Rubin?

  So it's even better than it was originally published.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  I would say the artists, they would be proud and happy if it would have been, if they could have seen it in this way.

• 1:21:14Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So first of all, you know, and that's the reason why we have it in a bigger scale, in a bigger size. The magazines, they downsized it to maybe half the size like it was. The original drawings were like in centimeters, let's say fifty centimeters each high for each page. And it was published in a size of twenty, yeah, or whatever that means in inches.

• 1:21:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  They did not spend a lot of money to make the registers all fit and all of this. But in an ideal world, you could have done it, yeah. So what we do with, and the reason why I tell you this is we don't want to alter something.

• 1:21:55Rick Rubin?

  It's more like a restoration.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  It's a restoration process, that's how I would describe it, yeah. And we put a lot of time and money into this to make that look as good as it gets. And I think that's what is regarded as well now.

• 1:22:12Rick Rubin?

  Is there another publishing house that you're a great fan of?

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  Oh, you know what, since I read every day and I buy everyday books from everywhere, old ones, new ones, there are a number of outstanding publishing houses. Let's say, yeah, Penguin, no doubt, has an amazing list and not only, and they have this for decades, it's for sure. One of these publishing houses or one of these brands where you know as well, okay, if this name is on it, if you're interested in the subject or not, doesn't matter, but at least you have a standard which is an excellent one. It's the same with a newspaper. Let's say if you read the New York Times or the Frankfurter Allgemeine or, I don't

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  know, the Le Monde or the Financial Times, at least you have a standard there and no matter which article you read and if, let's say you're on holidays and you have nothing else to read, you read the entire newspaper. So, but Penguin, but here as an art publisher, the Times and Hudson is a great publishing house, no doubt, and they do it for seventy, whatever, five years, and I admire stuff like that, yeah, especially if you are in it for a long time.

• 1:23:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  And still independent, you know.

• 1:23:29Rick Rubin?

  How is it different publishing something new versus publishing something that's out of print but has been printed in the past?

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Well, if you make a reprint of a famous book, yeah, let's say the Luther Bible from sixteen hundreds, five hundred years old, yeah, what you have to do is you have to find the, if possible, the very best example, because they're all slightly different. It's not that they're all the same, it was just hundreds of years ago and some were colorized, others not, some are in a poor condition by now, anyhow, you have to make the research to get the best. Famous edition, then you have to work on the reproduction of this. But basically, the book itself, to reproduce it,

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  beside of the scans and as well, how it's printed, the paper and all this. The work has been done by others many years ago. What you can do kind of as a gatekeeper, to make it look as good as it gets, five hundred years later, two hundred fifty or whatever, yeah?

• 1:24:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  So there is definitely some work involved, but the first, the real work was done. That's why it's a famous edition. Of course, you have to write a commentary and put it all into kind of historic context. But it is far less work than to do a new book and whatever the subject is, because then you start from scratch and you have to fill five hundred empty pages, you know?

• 1:25:18Rick Rubin?

  Typically, how long is the process from when you have an idea for a book until it's ready to be printed?

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  Look, the books we do, they have, let's say, from hundred to, let's say, a thousand pages. And it usually takes at least twelve months, but on average, I would say,

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  twenty-four months to do something, yeah? Then, of course, the production takes another six months, maybe, or three months, yeah?

• 1:25:51Rick Rubin?

  And do you tend to work with the same people over and over again?

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  Yes, I love that. I mean, if it's a good, if it was a good experience, I love it.

• 1:25:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Have you ever published a Bible?

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  Yes, we did even two versions, the Gutenberg Bible and the Luther Bible. And, you know, the Gutenberg Bible was the very first printed book and it's something, of course, of...

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Incredible historic value. But it's not overwhelmingly illustrated or so. I mean, it's more ornamental. All of it. And the Luther Bible, which was always regarded as the Bible for all the people. And it was the first, which was as well, not in Latin, but in this case in German. That is wonderfully, richly illustrated, you know. And we talked about Frank Frazetta. This is all in between Bosch and Frazetta. And I don't know, the wildest stories you can't even imagine, all EC comics. And it's artistically, very beautifully done.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  And as well, they're colored, which are just amazing works of art, yeah.

• 1:27:06Rick Rubin?

  Are all of your books image-based?

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Yes, but that's the beginning. And from there on, we have to, yeah, to contextualize it, to bring it in, explain what it is, what you see, and where it comes from. Let's say if it's a monograph of an artist, yeah. But you can start look at the pictures. And from there on, you might get hooked and want to understand where it comes from and what it is, what you see, you know. I mean, to say it basically, yeah. But I would say maybe our books have, they are visually driven, no doubt at all.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  And the visuals, we try to make as close to the original as we can and keep the integrity of the picture, whether it's a photo or painting, not cut it. And yeah, make it as good as it is. And that requires very often that you have to re-photograph everything in museums and wherever it is, because otherwise you cannot have the best possible reproduction. We just finished a book on Dalí, which is an oversized. And it's a kind of an anniversary edition, because we did our first Dalí book forty years ago.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  And this year, we have now a new book on Dalí, a two-volume book on Dalí coming out. And I remember we had to re-photograph at least. Hundred fifty paintings. And once you do this, you have to often even have to take them out of the frames. And it's for curators. I wouldn't say it's a nightmare, but it's definitely something.

• 1:28:58Rick Rubin?

  It's a lot of work.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  Definitely something they don't want to do too often.

• 1:29:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  But without it, you can't really make it work, you know?

• 1:29:07Rick Rubin?

  How has the technology changed from the first Dolly book forty years ago to now? In terms of printing, in terms of getting renderings of the images?

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  I think it changed dramatically. It doesn't say that you would not have had a great result depending on what you did. There were, I mean, the years ago, the, let's say, black and white photography books often looked better than they do today because some printing machines, they are just not in existence anymore. Yeah, so not everything what is new is better necessarily. It's, you know, about, it's about the grain and the overall look. Maybe comparable in music if you have an analog record compared to whatever is digital.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  And some people prefer definitely this version.

• 1:30:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Before the other. Color photography, it's different. I would say we have more possibilities and you can do better than years ago.

• 1:30:18Rick Rubin?

  How do the books get written? Are you pitched or do you commission them?

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  We pitched very often, but rarely do we have the pitch go into the next stage. So the vast majority of our books, we do, we have our idea how to make it work in these different formats and series, yeah? And we commission the authors and the designers and the team to make this happen.

• 1:30:50Rick Rubin?

  So that's different than most publishers, I would say.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  For sure, yeah. I don't know anybody who does it like this.

• 1:30:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, the writers and photographers that you work with are in the service of the vision, which is starting with Taschen. And that's unusual. I think most publishers, they acquire things that come from the outside.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Not that we have a formula, but we have our ideas how it should work and how it should look like. Whether it's good or not, different question that is. But we wanna have it in a certain way, in a certain style. And for some artists, or quite a number, that works well. And for others, probably not, I don't know. But the name of the company, of the brand, was for me always more important than anything else.

• 1:31:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  We tried to keep this in our hands, let's put it this way.

• 1:31:56Rick Rubin?

  Do you think of the books as reference books?

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  Yes, for sure, yeah. A majority of our books, I would say, it's a reference book.

• 1:32:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  And once we work on a subject, we try to make it as comprehensive or as good as we can. Doesn't say that it works like this all the time, but at least we try.

• 1:32:19Rick Rubin?

  It's the intention.

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  The intention is there.

• 1:32:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, but even after thousands of books, you still feel that. It's great.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Definitely, because I'm really grateful and happy that I can be in this, for me, the most exciting job. I did not lose any...

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  Probably I have more, I'm more into it than I was even like ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Because right now I can focus more on it, because I'm in the wonderful situation that my oldest daughter, Marlena, runs for the last ten years, all the operations. And so I can focus even better than I did before. And I have a more, as a sparring partner at the same time.

• 1:33:09Rick Rubin?

  Fantastic.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  And that enables me as well to focus more on what I love to do on the first hand. And that is producing books, yeah.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:33:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, how do you decide if a book is gonna be a limited edition, collector's item, expensive book versus a mass market book?

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Well, the subject defines it. If you have, if you work, let's say, with a photographer, you only can do it with people who have a worldwide recognition and an ovary behind it that supports this. We often don't know how it will end up because we have to dive into it and look into it. And so there was a story I heard about MGM, the film studio. They said, these people, they started to edit the film when it was cut already, you know?

• 1:34:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  But I like this idea.

• 1:34:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  Although it is, although it makes like not too much economic sense. But at least at that point, stage, you understand what you're into. And before, at least from my perspective, I often do not know what I'm into.

• 1:34:23Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Because it requires to go into, to work on a new subject. And only by doing so, you understand, and you see it may be different or want to add stuff or take out. So, yeah, we often edit our books very late while they're done already. After the first edit, we make a completely different second one.

• 1:34:50Rick Rubin?

  Do you get as excited about an idea today as you would have thirty years ago?

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  I would say so, no doubt. I am excited about everything which is exciting, what is exciting for me.

• 1:35:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Like a young boy, maybe I never kept my, whatever, being ten years old. I love it, I love when the books arrive. Every book is always sent to our office in Los Angeles every, every daily. And I love to keep it in my, to feel it, to smell it, to look at the, whatever you can check in the moment. And I see them like, well, I wouldn't say children, because I love the children more than anything else in my life. My wife, my children, or French Bulldogs. But then the books come.

• 1:36:08Speaker 02

  Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

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• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  Counter-culture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammatin. The avant-garde? Tetragrammatin. Generative art? Tetragrammatin. The tarot? Tetragrammatin. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammatin. Biodynamics? Tetragrammatin. Graphic design? Tetragrammatin. Mythology and magic? Tetragrammatin. Obscure film? Tetragrammatin. Beach culture? Tetragrammatin. Esoteric lectures? Tetragrammatin. Off-the-grid living? Tetragrammatin. Alt spirituality? Tetragrammatin. The canon of fine objects? Tetragrammatin. Muscle cars? Tetragrammatin. Ancient wisdom for a new age.

• 1:37:11Speaker 03

  Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.