The Kerlan Collection

Farm scene draft for The Day the Cow Sneezed (1957), Flora's second children's book. The landscape image is one of 80 scans Barbara and I recently acquired from the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota. We plan to reproduce a number of these early work pages in our third book of Floriana, currently being compiled and written.

Among the artifacts — donated to the University by the artist — was an eye-popping version of Flora's first children's book, The Fabulous Firework Family (1955). At first glance, we thought it was a badly preserved first edition because the pages were detached and stuffed between covers. Upon closer inspection, we discovered that Flora had reconstructed the book by sequencing his original drafts of each page, which were rendered on various types of paper in pencil, pen and watercolor. He then trimmed text sections from a printed edition and glued them in position on each page.

The one-of-a-kind copy was inscribed with affection to Dr. Kerlan.