Marilyn Sotto's The Art of Costume Design

Lessons on how to become a costume designer, or just draw like one, from 1960

If one were interested in learning more about the costume design process, it would be remiss not to suggest seeking out a copy of The Art of Costume Design from 1960. At just twenty-eight, Marilyn Sotto wrote and illustrated the how-to guide for Walter T. Foster, a publishing company dedicated to “how to draw” books.

Marilyn Sotto, late-1950s.

These instructional manuals were affordable—just $1 in 1960 (around $10.78 today, adjusting for inflation) and usually displayed in art stores on metal racks specially made for their oversized dimensions. Foster founded the publishing company in Los Angeles around 1922; as he told the Los Angeles Times in 1969, “After cartooning for newspapers, a stint on vaudeville and a job with a correspondence course publisher, I opened an advertising agency in Los Angeles," he recalled. "Kids from nearby art schools dropped by looking for work, but their techniques were wrong. I thought the book might help." Walter Foster wrote and drew the first book, How to Draw Heads, along with many other titles over the years, while also hiring artists that he met through his advertising company to round out the offerings; he printed, bound, packaged, shipped, and distributed the books himself. During the first few years, “…I traveled by sleeper bus, carrying a briefcase full of books, fighting tooth and nail to convince art store owners they could sell books.” For twenty-five years he was his own jobber, crossing the country once or twice a year, also building the racks out of wood himself. By 1930, he was doing well enough that he was able to close his advertising company and stop teaching art part-time. An English competitor in the late 1930s threatened his sales, leading Foster to start printing in the luminous color that so singles out his publications. In 1960, Foster sold 1,090,000 copies at $1 each (that’s almost $ 12 million gross today)—with a staff of only three (two shippers and a secretary), there was a sizable enough net that he could proclaim, “Now I travel by jet…”

An ad for a Hong Kong art store selling the “How to Draw” books, South China Morning Post, January 14, 1949.

A lot of 25 Walter T. Foster books for sale on eBay.

Seventy-one titles are offered at the back of The Art of Costume Design (with numbers going up to 88 revealing the occasional decommissioning of some); most are for drawing and painting, a small selection on “advertising cartooning,” with a few on crafts such as painting on textiles and block printing. For Foster, “I have felt the great need of a series of books that were practical, with a new and better understanding of every day problems of the busy commercial artists and students starting in, as well as you who want painting and drawing as a hobby…”

Walter Foster in his Laguna Beach studio, overlooking the Pacific. The Hartford Courant, October 29, 1961.