Junior Editions

Several days ago I mentioned some 1939/1940 printings of a few Oz titles, generated by interest in the MGM movie. Here is another set of books that was produced at the same time. Rand McNally published these Junior Editions of six Oz books, as well as reprinting the six stories from the Little Wizard Series in 3 books. The Junior Editions are abridged versions of full size Oz books - the Little Wizard stories were originally written as short stories. All nine books were available in a boxed set, something that doesn't turn up very often!

This edition of The Road to Oz is unique, as this is the only printing to have color plates. The original book was printed on various shades of paper, and the publishers never bothered to add color plates when the paper feature was dropped. For this printing, 12 color plates were created from the original black & white drawings. It would be interesting to see a hybrid of these two printings - the book printed on colored paper, with the 12 color plates tipped in!