Jim Flora - Commercial Art and Books

Commercial Art and Books

The couple returned to Connecticut in 1951, and Flora then embarked on a freelance commercial art career in which he would thrive for decades. He illustrated covers and interior articles for dozens of mainstream magazines, Fortune, Holiday, Life, Look, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Mademoiselle, Charm, Research and Engineering, Computer Design, Sports Illustrated, Collier's and Pic.

From January to December, 1952, he was Art Director at Park East magazine, for which he published the first commercial illustrations by R.O. Blechman, as well as spot illustrations by the young Andy Warhol. Flora resigned at the end of 1952, and was replaced as Art Director by Robert M. Jones, who in 1945 had replaced him as Art Director at Columbia Records.

As fate would have it, in March 1953 Jones became Art Director at RCA Victor Records, where he soon began jobbing out album cover assignments to his friend Flora. This resulted in a veritable Golden Age of Flora LP covers, including such celebrated designs as Mambo For Cats, Inside Sauter-Finegan, Lord Buckley's Hipsters, Flipsters, and Finger-Poppin' Daddies, Knock Me Your Lobes, and Shorty Rogers Courts the Count. Around this time, Flora also did spot jobs for Columbia as a freelancer, illustrating album covers and reviving Coda during 1952 and 1953.

Among his other varied assignments in the 1950s, Flora drew a number of commercial storyboards for the pioneering animation studio, United Productions of America (UPA), on assignment from UPA Creative Director Gene Deitch, another lifelong friend. From September 1955 to August 1956 he served as Art Director for a short-lived technical monthly, Research & Engineering. He illustrated the cover of Computer Design magazine for 17 years (1960s and '70s), and frequent covers for American Legion magazine (1970s).

Between 1955 and 1969, working with renowned children's book editor Margaret McElderry at Harcourt Brace, Flora wrote and illustrated 11 books for young readers, including The Fabulous Firework Family (1955), The Day the Cow Sneezed (1957), Charlie Yup and His Snip-Snap Boys (1959) and Leopold, the See-Through Crumbpicker (1961).

In 1971, HB asked McElderry to take "early retirement" ("it was a real slap in the face," she later admitted). McElderry immediately received twelve job offers, and accepted a position at Atheneum Books, who gave the editor her own imprint. She quickly reconnected with and signed Flora, who between 1972 and 1982 created six more children's books for her, including Pishtosh, Bullwash, and Wimple (1972) and Stewed Goose (1973).