Flora Art Books
The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora
Designed by Laura Lindgren
One of Flora’s sustaining loves was music. His 1940s-50s Columbia and RCA Victor record covers, in which legendary musicians were routinely afflicted with mutant skin tints and bonus limbs, are classics of outlandish post-Cubist caricature. During this period Flora also produced an enormous amount of promotional ephemera, including new release monthlies, trade booklets, ads, and point-of-sale novelties. The now out-of-print Mischievous Art of Jim Flora (2004) featured his then-known album covers. Since that book’s publication, more covers have been found, as well as rough drafts and unused designs. This book features a complete collection of Flora covers (including recent discoveries) and unpublished sketches, augmented by music images not included in previous volumes. The High Fidelity Art is the definitive anthology of the maestro’s visual compositions, reflecting jazz, classical, and Latin music.
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Published by Fantagraphics Books (September 2013)
Format: 11″ x 10″ soft cover with flaps; 180 pages, full-color; ISBN: 1-60699-655-X
The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora
Designed by Laura Lindgren
THE SWEETLY DIABOLIC ART OF JIM FLORA burnishes the reputation of one of the great overlooked paintbox fantasists of the 20th century. Like the first two volumes of Floriana, Sweetly Diabolic features paintings, drawings, and sketches from the 1940s through the ’90s, many never previously published or exhibited; more artifacts from the artist’s 1940s tenure in the Columbia Records art department; and vintage newspaper and magazine illustrations. This collection also heralds the first publication of an early, abandoned children’s book, “The X-Ray Eye of Wallingford Hume,” which Flora drafted in 1943. Equally fascinating are original overlays, and concept images for his 1950s and ’60s published tot-lit. A gallery of 1940s pen and pencil sketches invokes a catacomb of nightmarish apparitions and inscrutable petroglyphs. In addition, The Sweetly Diabolic Art collects a sideshow of science widgetry from a short-lived, now-obscure mid-1950s monthly, Research & Engineering, for which Flora served as art director. Chronicles of Flora’s career, personal vignettes, and mementoes from the family archives augment the images..
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Published by Fantagraphics Books (July 2009)
Format: 11″ x 10″ soft cover with flaps; 180 pages, full-color; ISBN: 1-60699-159-0
The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora
Designed by Laura Lindgren
THE CURIOUSLY SINISTER ART OF JIM FLORA presents rascally and rarely seen fine art and artifacts from Flora’s private collection. Fans of Flora’s LP covers, kid-lit, and Mischievous Art offerings will marvel at these eye-boggling treasures, which include paintings, watercolors, sketches, woodcuts and all manner of visual genius. Flora’s style is cartoonish, evoking childhood nostalgia and dereliction of adult responsibility. There are clowns and kitty cats, grinning faces and beaming suns. But Flora did not restrain his darker impulses. His montages are dotted with guns and knives and fang-baring snakes. Muggers run amok, demons frolic with rouged harlots, and Flora’s characters suffer – that is, are afflicted by the artist with — severe disfigurement. The Curiously Sinister Art features over 240 images, including 1940s Columbia Records printed matter exhibiting Flora’s visual pranks; magazine illos from the 1940s-1960s; relics from his late-1930s academic years, photos, and personal keepsakes.
Note: This book is out of print, but copies can be found from secondary retail sources such as Ebay and Amazon.
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Published by Fantagraphics Books (February 2007)
Format: 11″ x 10″ soft cover with flaps; 180 pages, full-color; ISBN: 1-56097-805-3
The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora
Designed by Laura Lindgren
THE MISCHIEVOUS ART OF JIM FLORA was the first comprehensive collection of record album and music art by Flora, featuring over 225 images. The book contains his most spectacular covers for Columbia and RCA Victor (including several previously uncirculated rejected covers). The anthology features extensive galleries of rarely seen 1940s and ’50s illustrations from Columbia’s trade journal Coda as well as Flora’s magazine work from the post-war period. The book includes two interviews with Flora, along with reminiscences by his friends Gene Deitch and Alex Steinweiss, and a celebratory essay by Shag. The Mischievous Art also presents the first-ever reprinting of Flora’s fabled Little Man Press illustrations (1939-1942). LMP was a hand-press imprint started by literary nutjob Robert Lowry, who recruited Flora as art director. Their Cincinnati-based editions were printed at home in small runs of 125 to 400 copies, and featured Flora’s woodcut covers and interior illos, which veered from childishly whimsical to disturbingly freakish.
Note: This book is out of print, but copies can be found from secondary retail sources such as Ebay and Amazon. The 2013 book The High Fidelity Art of Jim Flora contains all record covers contained in this book—and more! However, there is much content in The Mischievous Art which was not reproduced in High Fidelity Art.
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Published by Fantagraphics Books (October 2004; 2nd edition [revised] February 2007)
Format: 11″ x 10″ soft cover with flaps; 180 pages, full-color; ISBN: 1-56097-600-4
