Frank Dobias

Frank Dobias (1902-?) was an illustrator of children's books. Among many other works, his illustrations for the Japanese version of Little Black Sambo made the book a bestseller in Japan, selling well over a million copies between 1953-1988.

He was born in Austria and moved to the United States around the 1920s, where he started his professional career as illustrator mostly for Macmillan Publishers books. The illustrations used in the Japanese best-seller were originally drawn for Little Black Sambo published from Macmillan in 1927, of which the cover is shown in the AskART page of The American Artists Bluebook.

The Macmillan 1927 version was revived from Komichi Shobo Publishing, a Japanese publisher in Tokyo, in 2008.

Bibliography

• Bannerman, Helen. Little Black Sambo. The Happy Hour Books. Macmillan Publishers, 1927.
• Siebe, Josephine. Kasperle’s Adventures. Translated by Florence Geiser. Macmillan Publishers, 1929.
• Morris, William. Sons of the Volsungs. Adapted by Dorothy Hosford from Sigurd the Volsung by William Morris. Macmillan Publishers, 1932.
• Junior Bible. Macmillan Publishers, 1936.
• Kelsey, Alice (Geer). Once the Hodja. Longman’s 1943.　Jeremy Schiff's Hodja homepage contains some illustrations by Frank Dobias for Once the Hodja.
• Bannerman, Helen. Chibikuro Sambo. Komichi Shobo Publishing, 2008. (A Japanese translation of Macmillan's 1927 version.)