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...

Introduction

Sacred islands and ponds

Gardens of joy

Rocks in the sand

Gardens of austerity

Path and goal

Gardens of seclusion

Famous views from literature and reality

Gardens as substitutes of travel

The carver and the carved

Gardens as mindscapes