According to her own information, Angelika Taschen was conceived in a book shop. She was born in 1959 in the small town of Homberg in the state of Hessen. After finishing secondary school in 1978 she first trained as a classical ballet dancer. But at a height of 1.76, she was too tall for a careeer as a prima ballerina. That was another reason why, in 1979, she started to study German language and literature and art history at university in Heidelberg. That same year she married art historian Stefan Muthesius. She has a daughter from that marriage. After writing her dissertation on Futurism she applied for a job at Taschen Books, where she soon rose to be managing editor. There she got to know her second husband, Benedikt Taschen. Together with him she made Taschen Books the world's largest illustrated book publishing company. The Indian Times dubbed her "queen of the coffee table books" because of the often heavy art and design tomes she published. After separating from her second husband, she moved to Berlin in 2004 and founded her own small publishing company there.