Ten years after

One day in Los Angeles in the year 1997 Helmut received a call from Benedikt Taschen, the German publisher, who was staying in a hotel minutes away from ours and told him he had something to show him. So, Helmut went off to see what it was. Shortly after, I received a call from Helmut telling me to drop everything and come at once. I obeyed his order and walked the few blocks to Benedikt’s hotel and took the lift to his suite, to find Benedikt and Helmut awaiting my reaction to what eventually became known as SUMO—the most expensive 20th-century book at a charity auction in Berlin on 6 April 2000.

A magnificent piece of work, the brainchild of a publisher who was to change the world of publishing. A daring maverick of a man. I fell in love with it immediately. It was an empty maquette, except for a few printed pages. One of which was a snap that Helmut had taken of me in our apartment in the Marais in Paris. It was taken after dinner one evening in our kitchen. I was wearing an Ossie Clark peignoir and Helmut, who always had a camera ready, asked me to open up, but Benedikt’s wit had nothing to do with my immediate reaction to something I’d never seen before.

Helmut was reticent but I wasn’t. That evening began a lifelong friendship and it is fitting that, in Helmut’s absence, “Ten Years After”, this smaller edition of SUMO will coincide with an exhibition of the original pages from the book that many admirers of Helmut’s work could not afford to buy.