October

The October issue of 1923 is made up, appropriately, of costume drawings by Will R. Barnes, the costume designer at New York’s Hippodrome theater. The Hippodrome was the largest and best-known theater in the city, famous for its spectacular shows and, later, musicals featuring hundreds of performers.

From 1908 to 1923, the showman R. H. Burnside was the artistic director at the Hippodrome, responsible for these performances. During 1923, they staged a show called Better Times (the follow-up to the wildly successful Good Times ), and one called Stepping Stones. The costume design cards from those two shows make up the illustrations in this zine.

These images are just a handful of the hundreds of drawings by Will Barnes and in the R. H. Burnside collection held at the New York Public Library. It is quite a remarkable collection, and bears looking through!