THE DELINEATOR Magazine Profile

THE DELINEATOR (A Journal of Fashion, Culture, and Fine Arts) began in 1873 and was published until 1937, when it was merged into PICTORIAL REVIEW. A Butterick publication (see the Wikipedia article), it was one of the company's flagship titles. You can click here to go directly to the gallery of cover images.

We have some good cover images from both its early period (when the covers were mostly or completely unchanging) and its later period (when it published some extremely striking covers). The large images are almost all from the University of California Libraries (before 1900) and the Library of Congress copyright set (after 1900). Neither institution has a complete run. Publishing history and artist information will also be added as we can.

The magazine had a song named in its honor! The last item in the gallery is a (rather poor quality, sorry) image of the sheet music for it. Also, we've added two issues of PICTORIAL REVIEW at the end, one from just before the merger and one from just after, to show how it changed (or didn't change).

In the 1930's THE DELINEATOR had a standard style, an Art Deco sort of thing, for its covers, but in the last year or so it experimented quite a bit with cover design. This could have been an attempt to increase newsstand circulation, or to use older art in inventory as a way of cutting costs. Or perhaps it was just that a new art director was given free reign. It must have made it hard to find the magazine on the newsstand. The period of experimentation ended with the merger, and PICTORIAL REVIEW'S covers looked pretty much the same for some time, before and after.

The LoC catalog files the magazine under the following keywords:

Dressmaking--Periodicals.
Needlework--Periodicals.
Millinery--Periodicals.

but it was much more than that. It ran fiction and self-help articles, as well as guides to the usual kinds of things considered "women's work." Some issues of this magazine have been indexed at the FictionMags Index site.

One of the features of the magazine was its color prints of the latest fashions, with enough information provided so that the careful clothing-maker could duplicate them. By special arrangement we have some of the fashion pages from the same issues shown in the cover galleries.

Delineator1898-02 Fashions p2

February 1898
Fashions p. 2

 Delineator1898-10 Fashions p2

October 1898
Fashions p. 2

Sources:

  • Our own files
  • Library of Congress
  • University of California Libraries
  • eBay sellers

Update history:

  • 1 September 2020: Updated for links and compatibility with new display system software.
  • 12 January 2007: New version of this document, for new website version.
  • 12 November 2004: Updated formats
  • 1 November 2004: Added 48 more images of DELINEATOR covers, and 3 other items
  • 29 October 2004: Created these web pages for THE DELINEATOR, beginning with 11 cover images 1895-1906, and 11 fashion pages from 1898