60 years and running

British artist David Hockney turns pages of A Bigger Book during the book fair in Frankfurt, Germany. Reuters

The first 1,000 copies are what the publisher calls the "art edition", selling at $5,000 each, of which 500 were sold, says Veronica Weller, Taschen's director of corporate communications.

The remaining 9,000, the "collector's edition" and priced at $2,500 each, are receiving lots of preorders, she says.

"The reason we did the book is simple. Our publisher, Benedikt Taschen, has been an admirer of Hockney's art for many years and has been dreaming of producing a large-scale book about him," she says.

There are not many artists who lend themselves to a big book like this, but the incredible variety of Hockney's oeuvre surely is meant to be shown on this scale, she says.

"It is like a retrospective, a museum show in a book format, only that no museum in the world could ever bring together so many great works of art."

Benedikt Taschen has also published a book on photographer Helmut Newton, the first of the "sumo" books that holds the record of being the world's most expensive book printed in the 20th century.

The No 1 volume in a limited, numbered edition sold in 2001 for $304,000, though the original price for copies of that edition was $1,500.