James Flora Papers

James (Jim) Flora was born 25 January 1914, in Bellefontaine, Ohio, the son of James Bernard (a barber) and Laura (Royer) Flora. He attended Urbana University (1931-1933), the Art Academy of Cincinnati (1934-1939), and Atelier 17 (two years). He co-founded The Little Man Press, a series of letterpress publications, with author Robert Lowry (1919-1994), and provided illustrations and designs for Little Man publications (1939-1942). After graduating from the Art Academy, he began freelancing in Cincinnati. His clients included Procter and Gamble and the Union Central Life Insurance Co.

Flora was hired by the art department of Columbia Records in 1942, and established a reputation for his eccentric and amusing style of caricature, which appeared in Columbia's trade literature and ads. He became the label's art director in 1943, and was later promoted to advertising manager, and then sales promotion manager. He began designing (without credit) album covers for Columbia around 1945. Around 1947 he began a series of idiosyncratically stylized, cartoonish covers (usually signed), which are today considered some of the more dazzling exemplars of the early golden age of album cover design. Some of these works can be viewed here, and dozens were reproduced in a book by Irwin Chusid, entitled The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora (Fantagraphics Books, 2004).

Flora left Columbia Records in 1950 and moved with his family to Mexico. They lived in the town of Taxco, which provided the inspiration and setting for Flora's first published children's book, The Fabulous Firework Family (1955). After returning from Mexico in 1951, Flora lived in Rowayton, Connecticut, and resumed his career as a freelance illustrator. He returned to album cover design in 1953, this time for RCA Victor, on a series of widely acclaimed assignments jobbed out by RCA art director, Robert M. Jones (who had succeeded Flora as Columbia Records' art director in 1945).

The success of The Fabulous Firework Family convinced Flora to devote more time to authoring and illustrating children's books. He eventually wrote and drew 17, both for Harcourt Brace and for Atheneum, between 1955 and 1982. Several of these books were later adapted into animated features, for which Flora wrote the scripts. He was a boating enthusiast, and spent a good deal of his time during the 1980s and 1990s painting works with nautical themes, including large, intricate steamship canvases. James Flora passed away in 1998.