📚 Costume

Books with costume on their catalogue record, first published between 1917 and 2001, ordered by how many editions are in print.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject costume in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print, out of the 14,598 works the catalogue holds under that subject. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Woman as Decoration	Emily Burbank	1917	26
	Patterns of fashion	Janet Arnold	1964	25
	Costume & fashion	Herbert Norris	1924	18
	Peasant costume in Europe	Kathleen Mann	1931	18
	Period costume for stage & screen	Jean Hunnisett	1986	17
	Historic costume	Katherine Morris Lester	1925	14
	Classical dances and costumes of India	Kay Ambrose	1950	14
	Costumes for the stage	Sheila Jackson	1978	13
	Survey of historic costume	Phyllis G. Tortora	1989	12
	Kostümwerk	Wolfgang Bruhn	1955	11
	History of twentieth century fashion	Elizabeth Ewing	1974	11
	The language of clothes	Alison Lurie	1981	11
	In Vogue	Georgina Howell	1975	10
	The book of costume	Millia Davenport	1948	9
	A history of fashion	J. Anderson Black	1975	9
	Art in costume design	Edna Mann Shover	1920	8
	What people wore	Douglas Gorsline	1952	8
	Costume (DK Eyewitness)	L. Rowland-Warne	1992	8
	The mode in costume	Wilcox, R. Turner	1942	7
	Kostumschnitte und Gewandformen	Max Tilke	1956	7
	Stage costumes and how to make them	Julia Tompkins	1969	7
	Jane Asher's fancy dress	Jane Asher	1983	7
	History of costume	Blanche Payne	1965	6
	Seeing through clothes	Anne Hollander	1978	6
	Fashion in costume, 1200-1980	Joan Nunn	1984	6
	Victorian and Edwardian Fashion	Alison Gernsheim	1981	5
	Costume and fashion	James Laver	1982	5
	History of 20th Century Fashion	Elizabeth Ewing	1997	5
	Etoffe du Diable	Michel Pastoureau	2001	5
	Encyclopedia of world costume	Doreen Yarwood	1978	4

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 24 Oct 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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