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A serious illness when I was 8 years old required that I stay in bed for three months--that's when I discovered the joy of reading-and it's never left me! My favorite book as a child was "Little Women"--then came "Little Men" and the rest of Louisa May Alcott's books for children. I loved them all!
Along with Louisa’s titles, my other favorite books as a child were a series entitled “Childhood of Famous Americans.” Many baby-boomers called them the “orange biographies” because of the bright orange covers. I can still remember riding my bicycle to the public library and loading up on as many of those books as would fit in my bike basket—everything from “Abe Lincoln, Frontier Boy” to “Zeb Pike, Boy Traveler”—there were 200+ books in that Series about famous Americans as children and I must have read all of them!
When I graduated from college, I went to work for the Bobbs-Merrill Publishing Company in my hometown of Indianapolis—the original publishers of “The Joy of Cooking,” the Raggedy Ann books—and the Childhood of Famous Americans, so I was fortunate enough to be able to work with the books I loved so much when I was young. That was the 1970’s, and as the years passed, I saw most of my beloved “orange biographies” disappear from shelves and stores. In the late 1990’s, I decided that I wanted to start my own publishing company to restore to print many of the older books in the Series—at that time a selected few were and are still in print with another company, but most of them no longer existed. I felt so strongly that children of today would enjoy the stories of the children of yesterday—and now, 8 years later, I have restored 14 books to print with new covers and illustrations under the “Young Patriots Series” imprint.
I have been fortunate enough to work with an amazing editorial team—Harold Underdown, author of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Children’s Books,” is my editor; Cathy Morrison (see samples of her incredible art at www.cathymorrison.com) has illustrated all 14 of the Young Patriots Series; and Tim Mayer of TM Design is my go-to guy for book design. Working with them has been a joy—and of course the other joy has been visiting kids in schools and book festivals and talking with them about the Young Patriots Series. In addition to my publishing activities, I’m also President of the Independent Book Publishers Association, a 4000-member trade association. In my spare time, I like to read (of course!), travel and spend as much time as possible with my two wonderful children.
I’m looking forward to contributing to JacketFlap, particularly in the arena of children’s book publishing although as I said earlier, I hope to “talk” with the “Little Women” fans as well! I feel so fortunate to be able to work in the book industry and love what I do.
Thanks for reading!

Florrie
PS. Authors, no submissions please—we only (re-) publish books that have already been written.

A serious illness when I was 8 years old required that I stay in bed for three months--that's when I discovered the joy of reading-and it's never left me! My favorite book as a child was "Little Women"--then came "Little Men" and the rest of Louisa May Alcott's books for children. I loved them all! Along with Louisa’s titles, my other favorite books as a child were a series entitled “Childho... More