Arnold

Most photographic biographies are assembled after the subject has stopped being interesting. This one had to wait for a man who kept adding careers: Austrian village boy, four-time Mr. Universe, seven-time Mr. Olympia, the world's leading action film star, and then the governor of California.

Arnold is Taschen's 528-page photographic biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger, covering more than 70 years from an impoverished childhood in the village of Thal to the governor's mansion. The pictures are the argument for the format. Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Francesco Scavullo, Sante D'Orazio and Andy Warhol all photographed him at one point or another, and their work sits beside intimate bodybuilding images, behind-the-scenes film stills and dozens of photographs from his personal archive. Editor Dian Hanson threads exclusive interviews through the sequence: Schwarzenegger himself, the directors Ivan Reitman and Bob Rafelson, and the bodybuilders Franco Columbu, Dave Draper and Frank Zane, who were in the gym when the myth was still being built.

Taschen prints it at the scale the subject invites. The book falls into the publisher's XL class, reserved for volumes at least 34 centimetres tall, and this hardcover clears that comfortably at 26.7 by 37.4 centimetres and 4.73 kilograms, with a fold-out that opens wider still. It is a book you put on a table rather than hold.

It began life as a signed Collector's Edition, a decade in the making by Taschen's own account, limited to 1,447 numbered copies and long since sold out. The unlimited edition you are looking at keeps every photograph and every interview, which is the part that matters, and comes in separate English and German editions.