I would never try to tell my children [six eight and 10] why

I would never try to tell my children [six, eight and 10] why they should like modern art or whatever. If there is a connection they will start on their own, if not they won’t.” If the opportunity to buy a collection came up and he needed 4,000 marks in a hurry, his mother always “took care of it… I always felt welcome and they gave me all the self-confidence I need.” The coughing reaches a crescendo. He mops his brow and says wistfully, “Maybe go downstairs and eat something now?”The canteen, with noticeboards, wacky artwork, book displays, Gaggia machine, mounted antlers and funky Fifties styling, caters for the 75- strong staff from Monday to Thursday. Today the imperious grey-bearded Latvian chef, Edwin, who contrives to be both roly-poly and faintly intimidating, is serving vegetable soup and Wiener schnitzel. His official title of chef doesn’t do justice to his importance in the organisation: a close friend of Taschen, he is employed to serve up both wonderful food and and odd flashes of lateral thinking “Zwei Suppe!” he announces with a flourish. It is delicious, pearled with flecks of butter and pungent with saffron, though Taschen is momentarily put out when he splashes his trousers: “Always when I eat soup.

Scheisse.”The Taschen story began in earnest in the early Eighties with the impulse purchase of a batch of remaindered books on Magritte; with his bookshop partner he bought all 40,000, then sold them for over twice what he’d paid. The book was cheap and well-illustrated, and the fact that it was in English seemed not to inhibit German buyers. Benedikt Taschen was soon asking booksellers to make the same leap of faith with titles of his own, supplying them in large quantities but non-returnably (one reason why they turned up in bargain bookshops). The first book with the Taschen imprimatur, on Dal, came out in 1985. It was accompanied by a poster bearing the slogan “A genius like me for only pounds 3.95″. Buyers found this offer irresistible.Humour has always taken the place of hype for Taschen; their catalogues feature a system of symbols for easy classification of titles: a moneybag for a potential bestseller, a cigar to indicate “Publisher’s Choice”, and a curious triangular symbol which signals erotica.

Another, less frequently seen, symbol was a cigar with a cross over it and the legend “Sorry, poor book”. According to the 1994 catalogue, Japanese Design, Italian Design and the monographs on Delaunay and Klee were “poor books”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this rash display of honesty quickly ceased.Taschen has now published, he estimates, around 250 titles, of which 120 are in print Thirty new titles a year is “the most we can manage”. What lifts him above being simply a pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap merchant is the weighty, academic stuff, like the forthcoming 2,000-page Monet catalogue, or the books that are a labour of love. How else could you describe the catalogue of the works of Soutine (cigar but no moneybag). “Soutine is one of the very few people in 20th century art who are unknown. From the beginning we thought we can only do it if we put it in the same format as the big names like Picasso and Van Gogh.

Soutine was always more of an artists’ artist, his reputation has not been big up to the last five or 10 years, but for sure it’s my feeling he’s one of the most important painters of the century.”Taschen is vague about how he keeps his prices so low: “We begin always by saying that the books as a series will look like this and cost, I don’t know, pounds 10, so can we sell so many in such-and-such a time? Which means we usually make the calculation backwards. We have to take care that the price is the lowest we can afford to sell for. Our production in relation to other publishing houses is quite high, because we don’t take over licences, we make the whole conception – the writing and so on – ourselves.” Company turnover is an obsessively guarded secret (a recent estimate put it at pounds 46m), leading to the suspicion that his profits may be less impressive than his sales figures.Heading his own company has given him the freedom to start work at noon, collect art and travel widely, but it has not, he says, made him rich “Rich-minded? Yes. Money, no! I have a lot of books and they can be changed immediately into money if the readers ask for them If they don’t, they remain books So you never know. I like my paintings, and therefore I am highly materialistic, but I don’t care much for attributes which are commonwise specified as being materialistic, like cars.”He shares a “really small” flat with Muthesias and her 16-year-old daughter just around the corner, with his three children visiting at weekends Taschen was divorced three months ago “It took a long time; around five years In England it’s much easier for someone in my case.

But I’m unfortunately not an Englishman – I’m joking!” Asked if the arrival of Muthesias precipitated the split, he says sombrely “Yes. But that’s maybe too simple as well, because you are only free to meet somebody else if something happened before.”Muthesias came to work for Taschen in 1987, after visiting the Frankfurt bookfair and being entranced by the only stall which wasn’t staffed by old gents in half-moon spectacles. Coming from a bookselling family, she was bowled over by this young company, and, later, by its founder. As well as stripping off for publicity photos, Muthesias designs all the covers, has edited books on erotic art, Sixties design and Jeff Koons, and is one of the people Taschen credits with shaping his vision, along with Paris-based critic Gilles Neret, who edited Erotica Universalis. Muthesias, blonde, slim and swanky in black suit and sheer black body with a basque underneath, is unabashed by reactions to “that” photo. “It was not my idea, it was Gilles who said to Benedikt: ‘You must be photographed with a naked woman!’ And so, it had to be me. There’s the feminist complaint, that as a naked woman I am an object.