Fortune magazine has a long and storied history of photography—consider Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans, to name two of our better known alumni—but until the 1950s, the covers of our magazine were almost entirely dedicated to illustration.
We’ve previously shared the covers of the 11 issues we printed in 1930, our first year of publishing. Today, in honor of the winter holiday season, we share December issue covers spanning our first decade.
As you can see in the gallery above, our illustrators—Ernest Hamlin Baker, Antonio Petruccelli, Erik Nitsche, and Joseph Binder among them—took great inspiration from the festive lights and holiday symbols of the season.
We hope you enjoy them.