Section art, 29th Annual of Advertising and Editorial ArtThe Art Directors Club of New York, 1950

Jugglers, a 1957 Flora woodcut, was recently editioned at Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress, in Knoxville. The 50 prints, struck from the original artist’s block, will be offered for sale by Jim Flora Art LLC in about a month. YH printed Railroad Town in 2006/2007, and plans to produce several more Flora relief prints over the next two years. A vintage artist’s print of this work was reproduced in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora.

It’s been a long time comin’ here in Minnesota — at last I can milk the cow, play some records and mow the lawn! Ah, yes — but it still drizzles. Hence the umbrella. And cigar. Saturday Evening Post advertising promotional booklet, 1955.

The Colorado-based Faded Line Clothing Co. has launched their Flora apparel series. Four different Flora images printed on sixteen shirts (and an infant’s onesie) can be viewed and purchased at the FLC Flora page. The images (licensed from Jim Flora Art LLC) are titled “Jived” (from the 1954 Primer for Prophets series); “Robot Guy” (detail from July 1956 Research & Engineering magazine cover); “Drummer” (1993 unpublished pen & ink of Gene Krupa); and “Hot Notes”…

early 1940s pencil sketch adapted forRobert Lowry short story “The Monkey Cane,”appearing in Gup (Little Man Press, 1942)

Detail, Mme Tellier’s Picnic, pen & ink, 1995

Pishtosh, Bullwash & Wimple, published in 1972 (back cover above), was Flora’s 12th children’s book, and first for Atheneum. His first eleven were published by Harcourt Brace, under legendary kid-lit editor Margaret McElderry. In 1971, after a quarter-century with the company, McElderry was remaindered by Harcourt. According to Publisher’s Weekly: After editing many Newbery and Caldecott Medal and Honor winners (including the Newbery and Caldecott Medals together, in 1952), McElderry was asked to take early…

Detail, Chioggia, early 1960s, acrylic

Sundazed Records, one of the world’s foremost boutique rock reissue labels, offers a new limited edition T-shirt emblazoned with a Jim Flora space-age pan-galactic starship. The original 1958 illustration (from the back of a Billy Mure LP) was black & white. Sundazed offers two colorized editions, the mustardy-cheesey: And the aqua & salmon tinted:

Producer/writer Bill Bernal was a dear friend of Jim Flora. In an autobiographical reminiscence penned in 1987, Flora recalled an intercession by Bernal that upscaled one of the artist’s less successful children’s books: In 1961 Leopold, the See-through Crumbpicker was published. It did not make much of a splash. It was illustrated differently than my other books and that may have been a mistake. I tried to see and do the illustrations as a child…