The Schaden.com boom
Type the name of a well-known photo book into Google and chances are there’ll be a reference to Schaden.com on the first page. Photographer John McDermott goes in search of Markus Schaden’s original bookstore a stone’s throw from the Cologne’s famous cathedral and finds a very forward-thinking owner.
Every other year in late September, Cologne, Germany’s fourth-biggest city, becomes the centre of the photography world for a week. That’s when Photokina, the world’s biggest and most important photo industry trade fair, takes place at the Cologne Exhibition Centre just across the Rhine from the city’s most famous landmark, the soaring twin-towered cathedral, the Kölner Dom. Just a short walk in the opposite direction, down a quiet narrow street that dead-ends in front of the Dom, another Cologne attraction, Schaden.com, is enhancing the city’s reputation as a beacon for photographers. Since opening its doors in 1998 the small company has steadily built a worldwide reputation as a leading source for photographic books.
Markus Schaden has been working in retail book sales for the past 23 years. After starting out selling everything from fiction to cook books, in the early Nineties he took a job at a huge Cologne shop specialising in art books. Photography was not yet a priority at the store.
“The first client I had there started me down the photography book path, educating me as to what was out there, what made a good photographic book, who the interesting photographers were,” recalls Markus. “I started to build up a nice little photo section, gradually making it bigger and bigger. Then I organised the first photo book signings at the store and continued to get more and more interested in it.”
One day in 1995 Markus was sitting in a café, talking with his brother about what kinds of things could be nice for them to do in life and it came to them: “What we really wanted to do was sell good photo books to nice people. This, we thought, could be a real pleasure.”
When it came to turning their dream into reality they decided that the first thing they needed to do was actually publish a book. “So Schaden Verlag (Schaden Publishing) was born. We jumped into a project with a Cologne photographer, Bernd Arnold, and produced an amazing book of black and white pictures taken in the area here around the cathedral.
“Every publisher’s first book is probably a little bit of a crazy thing and we made some mistakes that cost us a lot of money. And we produced the enormous, for us, quantity of 2,500 books. But the book itself was really nicely laid out and beautifully printed on good paper. It was very well received. Thirteen years later we do still have a few copies left.”
Meanwhile, Markus carried on with his job at the store, building up the photo section as well as his own knowledge and contacts in the photography world. By 1998 he was ready to quit and open his own shop with his brother and a friend. The first thing he did was to take a trip around the world to visit other established photography bookshops to get a better idea of how they looked and functioned.
“When I got to New York I went to A Photographer’s Place (now closed) on Mercer Street in Soho,” he recalls. “I had brought enough money with me to buy a signed copy of a Bruce Davidson book that I wanted and which I knew they had in the shop. It was in a little box and they really didn’t even want to let me look at it. I tried to buy it, but it became clear that they weren’t ready to part with it and 20 minutes later I was standing outside on the sidewalk with the $800 I had set aside for the purchase still in my pocket!
“A Photographer’s Place was a famous shop, but it was really ‘old school’. It had an atmosphere more like a dusty museum with everything covered in plastic, more like a shrine than a living place where books are coming and going. It was almost as if they preferred not be disturbed. But I realised then that I could make something like this work with a new approach, a bigger space and modern photographers.”
“It was the time when Amazon.com had entered the book business and been so successful. We just decided to call our place Schaden.com. But then it still took us another three years to really build up the internet side of the business.”
Entering the bright, modern shop at Burgmauer #10 is like finding a treasure trove for anyone who loves photography and fine books. One is immediately struck by the attractive floor-to-ceiling displays of books by a huge variety of photographers, ranging from the famous and the celebrated to the obscure or newly emerging. Every photo book worth looking at, every photographer of interest, seems to be available here.
“We carry around 5,000 titles in our ‘online’ shop alone, with some additional things, some ‘pearls’ that we would never sell over the internet, which are only available to customers who come to Cologne.”
The internet now accounts for a third of the company’s total sales and its customer base is global. Another third of sales come from the shop itself and the remaining third from the various book, photography and art fairs that Markus attends around the world. Checking the most recent online transactions Markus smiles broadly as he lists them in reverse order: “Switzerland, some Germans, London, Holland, Belgium, Los Angeles, Puerto Rico, Shanghai, Japan, Australia, France, Sweden, Budapest…sometimes I’m just astonished at where they come from. But it’s the modern world and it’s so much smaller now. And photography has become an international business. Without the internet it wouldn’t be possible.”
The Schaden.com website is indeed not only elegantly-designed but easy to use and constantly updated. It’s divided into sections such as ‘Kiosk Germany’, ‘Japanese Eyes’, ‘The Americans’, ‘Global Players’, ‘Magnum & Co’, ‘Fashion and Style’ and, possibly the most intriguing area, ‘Bizarre!?!’ It’s an interesting and fun site, as Markus points out, “it’s never closed”.
Schaden estimates that there are about 20,000 people worldwide who are regularly interested in buying photo books. But, he says, there are no more than 10 or 15 shops dealing in them exclusively. “Photo Eye in Santa Fe; La Chambre Claire in Paris; Arcana in Santa Monica; the new shop Time Zone 8 in Beijing; 213 in Sydney; there’s a nice little shop in Stockholm; there was Scalo in Switzerland, but it recently closed, and of course us in Cologne. It’s a small group, not that many really.
When asked which books are his best-sellers Schaden’s unhesitating response is perhaps surprising. “Germans are rediscovering the American masters like William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, Mitch Epstein, Joel Sternfeld and Robert Adams,” he explains. “We do quite well with them, with the New Colour and the New Topographics. The real best seller for us was Eggleston’s Two and a Quarter. We sold around 300 copies, which is a very good number for us. We’ve had about 10 or 15 titles that have done that well, such as Martin Parr’s The Photobook: A History.
The Dusseldorf School (officially, the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf) has produced some of the biggest names in contemporary fine art photography, people like Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, Axel Hutte and Thomas Ruff. Cologne is only 30 kilometers from Düsseldorf, but apart from current superstar Gursky, whose one-man show at Munich’s Haus der Kunst has been making the headlines, only Höfer has ever visited the shop.
“We have much better relationships with the Americans. Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, they always come in when they are nearby. The first thing they want to do is browse a bit in the shop and say hello. But the Düsseldorf photographers, while they are very successful, if you look at their bibliographies it’s mostly just the catalogues from shows. They are much less interested in photo books.”
Martin Parr called Markus when he was writing his book on photo books to ask who from the [Düsseldorf] group did he think should be included.
“In the end we had a hard time,” recalls Markus. “There were really only two to consider: Gursky’s Montparnasse and Struth’s nice museum project. I was invited to lecture at the School to Thomas Ruff’s class and I asked him why he never made a book, and he just said: ‘I’m not really interested in doing this’.”
While it’s a relatively small portion of the company’s overall business, Schaden.com has continued, occasionally, to publish its own books. They work primarily with younger German photographers like Oliver Sieber, whose objective portraiture is reminiscent of the work of August Sander. Another is Josef Schulz, a conceptual landscape artist who works in the structured tradition of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Otto-Olaf Becker who produced a colour landscape book on Greenland. Schaden print runs are typically from 300 to 1,000 copies. Anything more than that and Markus thinks it’s better to leave the distribution to an outside company with a bigger network.
“Sometimes we make enough money to make it worthwhile, but other times not,” Markus explains. “It’s hard to know how a book will do. The Greenland book, for example, was very successful and a huge surprise. But we only printed 1,000 copies.”
An interesting Schaden variation on traditional photo book publishing came about more or less by chance.
“We call them our ‘upgrade’ or ‘bootleg’ editions,” he says. “Sometimes if a book doesn’t sell, or maybe we don’t like the cover, we make something new out of it.” This began when after Markus had ordered 200 copies of William Eggleston’s Los Alamos book for an in-store signing event with the famous Tennessee photographer. Eggleston came to Cologne and hung out in the shop for a week. But the Swiss publisher didn’t deliver the books in time for the event, leaving Markus not just upset, but also embarrassed.
“We lost business and we lost the fun. But William was very nice about it. Then we talked about how to salvage the situation if the books ever did arrive and came up with the idea of making some special editions. We ended up making fifty, each with a unique photo on the cover and each with a different colour linen binding.
“Then we made a little slipcase. The books sold for 300 Euros each, but it’s not really about making money. People got crazy about it. To get one was like becoming a member of a private Eggleston society. Each book was one of a kind. We did the same thing with Gary Winogrand’s Arrivals and Departures. We were not big fans of its original cover. So we took one book and cut it up and then used the images to make a special set of twenty books, each with its own unique cover. People loved it.”
After an hour or two in Markus’ shop – a must for anyone interested in photography or bookselling – the visitor begins to think: “Umm. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a bookshop like this in my home town…”