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The long-awaited series of fine-art screen prints PRIMER FOR PROPHETS are now available on eBay. Very cool Flora illustrations of the American nuclear family (and their weird pets) during the 1950s, when people had fried-egg eyes, dog food tins were edible, and teens grew bonus legs! Subtitled “A Flora ’50s A-B-C,” the images derive from a 1954 trade-only alphabet booklet titled Primer for Prophets that Flora illustrated for CBS-TV. The booklet was not circulated to…

To sustain the classic Flora LP tradition of the 1940s and ’50s, I’ve long advocated restoring his art to record album covers. Aside from one or two knockoffs of existing Flora designs, the first new release to adapt Flora non-LP art was Do This! by Seattle’s Reptet, in 2006. The cover for the forthcoming Raymond Scott Quintet CD Ectoplasm (scheduled for February 2008 US release) was completed last May. Now comes the Quartet San Francisco’s…

D.B. Dowd (Professor of Visual Communication, Washington University, St.Louis) opines: The modernist drive to split representation from its subject (that is, to open up a space between them, at the very least) included the ransacking of pre-modern art historical conventions, often to excellent effect. Jim Flora’s 1945 Coda cover draws on spot color printing and the use of spatial registers, a la Egyptian art, to deliver a strong graphic narrative with clarity and visual independence…

Production is complete: Flora carved Railroad Town in 1951 while living in Taxco. The trial proof relief print above was produced in December 2006. The June 2007 numbered edition (of 50), just completed at Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress in Knoxville, is even better (alas, no photo yet). Most of the “saltiness” (white flecking) visible above in the peripheries has been eliminated by printmaker Bryan Baker. The impression is solid—and stunning. The longer I stare at the…

This is a print detail of Railroad Town, a 1951 Jim Flora woodcut. What you see above is approximately one-tenth of the entire 11″ x 22.5″ work. The rest is equally outrageous. Barbara and I just returned from Knoxville, where we oversaw proofs for numbered, archival-quality limited edition relief prints of this iconic Flora work. All prints are restruck from the original Flora-cut block, and the edition will be produced by Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress. Prints…

That’s not what this work is titled. It has no title, and it’s a detail from a larger, possibly unpublished pen & ink mid-1950s cityscape. But it’s typically, Florifically, curiously sinister. And while alligators don’t really live in urban sewers, we have it on good authority that giant gophers burrowed the NYC subway system.

This three-tiered illustration appeared in the January 25, 1955, issue of Look magazine, accompanying an article by Fletcher Knebel entitled “The Welfare State is Here to Stay.” It reappears in our new book, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora. The Nanny State storyline caught the attention of our friend, economics blogger (and Floraficionado) Donald Luskin, who asked permission to post it at poorandstupid.com. The original illustration has not been found, and most likely wasn’t…