Filed Under: "children’s books"

Draft illustration, The Day the Cow Sneezed (1957)Flora’s second children’s bookThat goat gets around.

Not quite hot on the heels of The Mischievous Art and The Curiously Sinister Art, Barbara and I are now compiling a third volume of Floriana. Tentatively titled The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora, the book will be published by Fantagraphics in July or August 2009. Designer Laura Lindgren will once again transform our loosely organized text and Flora’s genial monstrosities into a tight, 180-page coffeetable bouquet. Over the next year, this blog will…

Flora-related stuff on the web: Dan Pearson of the Pioneer-Press (Illinois) reviews the Lake County Discovery Museum‘s exhibit: “Flora’s Art is Full of Fun.” Story includes interviews with LCDM’s Steve Furnet and your Florablogger. “Scribbler,” based in San Antonio, blogs about Vintage Books My Kid Loves, including Flora’s Kangaroo for Christmas and Grandpa’s Farm. Flora illustratrations for “Will Robots Make People Obsolete?” Parade Magazine, 1959, posted at the Paleo-Future blog. And download some Flora WFMU…

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…

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…

Detail, draft manuscript, The Fabulous Firework Family (1955)

Flora was a failed architecture student. He had to forego a scholarship to the Boston Architectural League in 1933 due to Depression-era financial constraints—he was too tired to attend classes after shifts as a busboy. (“I earned seven dollars a week plus meals and had to work the entire day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This meant that I could not attend classes. Late in October the school said they could no longer hold my scholarship open.”)…

Do you like children?, W.C. Fields was reportedly asked. “Yes, if they’re properly cooked.” Perhaps he would have enjoyed Flora’s savory recipe. From Grandpa’s Ghost Stories (Atheneum Books, 1978): Next we looked at Mrs. Ghost’s favorite program. It was about cooking and was called Feeding Phantom Faces. It opened with a big, fat-bellied demon in a tall white hat. He hauled in a big iron pot and showed us how to make soup out of…

From The X-Ray Eye of Wallingford Hume, a proposed children’s book, 1943. Project abandoned, images unpublished.

Artist Ward Jenkins reviews The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora at his Ward-O-Matic blog. Our friend Ward had previously posted about Flora’s 1957 kiddie caper, The Day The Cow Sneezed, showcasing some rarely seen draft illustrations.