Germany's Publishing Heavyweight

Benedikt Taschen, known for inexpensive books on artists, has gone ultra-high-end with a glossy, 75-pound tome on Muhammad Ali

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May 3, 2004 at 4:00 AM UTC

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German book publisher Benedikt Taschen puts everything he has behind his new releases. On Apr. 15 he unveiled GOAT: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali. The limited-edition photo book about the boxing legend sells for $3,000 a copy. Weighing in at 75 pounds, it's so heavy that just picking it up gave Taschen a double hernia that required surgery in mid-March. "We're including a note inside to always have two people lift it," he says.

GOAT, which stands for Greatest of All Time, may be the most outrageous venture yet from the 43-year-old Cologne native, who prides himself on two decades of shaking up the stuffy world of art-book publishing. His company, Taschen, now publishes the world's best-selling series of art books, the $9.99 Basic Art profiles of famous artists.