Ozzy Letters

Over the years I've picked up several examples of letters from the original Oz creators. Letters are always a fun personal item to view, and can help to give a sense of the author as a person. I've blogged about some of these before, but here's an overview.

The oldest is a note from W. W. Denslow dated 1896, predating Oz. This would have been after his time at the Chicago Times-Herald newspaper, and at the height of his poster career, particularly for the Rand McNally Company. 

The letter is a simple reply to a Mr. Leon Kramer, stating that Denslow would be pleased to see the sender "... at any time you would care to call." I imagine a visit to Denslow would be quite an experience! 

 The letter is headed "302 Herald Building", the home of the Chicago Herald newspaper where Denslow still maintained a studio; though he was no longer on the newspaper staff. The letterhead and envelope are both printed in red and feature a detailed seahorse, or hippocampus, drawing. This of course would evolve into Denslow's standard totem, used as a signature in his drawings.

The next is a letter by L. Frank Baum to one of his fans, from 1908. With the success of the Oz series, Baum was besieged by letters from his fans. He took pains to answer them, though he often apologized for the delay in responding. 

This particular example is on stationary from the Hotel Del Coronado, a favorite vacation spot of the Baum family, and where they stayed while looking for a home on the peninsula. He thanks the author of the letter, Sam Cleag Field, for some drawings of characters as well as ideas for future Oz stories. This would have been shortly before the publication of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, the 4th Oz book.

The next letter is also from Baum, but with a difference - this was written after the author died. Maud Baum kept up the tradition of responding to young fans, using a rubber stamp of her husband's signature. These ghostly letters must have caused some confusion at the time among the better informed fans! 

This particular example is from 1920, congratulating a girl named Mildred on winning a prize from the Plains-Dealer - presumably a newspaper contest with an Oz related prize of some sort. This letter is written on the attractive Oz letterhead featuring a number of Baum's books.

The next letter jumps over 20 years to 1942 and is from John R. Neill, the third Oz author and prolific Oz illustrator. This letter doesn't feature any custom letterhead, in fact it looks to be hastily written on a plain sheet of paper and posted in an envelope from the International Information Service in Washington, DC. I haven't seen much in the way of letters to fans from Neill, so it's difficult to say if this was standard practice! 

This is written to Bobby Jones, and congratulates him on having read 32 Oz books - also mentioning that the next year's book will be about a wooden whale (Lucky Bucky in Oz). 

Finally, I have a letter from Ruth Plumly Thompson. She was the Oz author between 1921 and 1939, but this particular letter is from 1965. It is written to author March Laumer in Thompson's standard type-written fashion, with various hand notations. This time the letterhead is an example of Thompson's standard Royal Historian of Oz paper. 

The letter is a chatty one, first apologizing for apparently thinking that March was a girl rather than a man, due to the name. At the time Laumer was serving in Hong Kong in the Marines. Thompson touches on a variety of subjects, including the possibilities of having her manuscript Yankee in Oz published; this wouldn't happen for another ten years, when The International Wizard of Oz Club finally published the story. She encourages Laumer to join the club, and mentions that eight out of every ten letters she receives are from men and boys.

 Perhaps I'll eventually acquire letters from the later Oz authors...as a collector, it's always good to have goals!

Thompson at Volland

I’ve blogged about The Perhappsy Chaps in the past, but since that time I’ve acquired a boxed copy of the book. Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote two books which were published by the P. F. Volland Company. This was a publisher who produced a number of decorative children’s books, many in matching boxes. The company was founded in 1908, and continued producing books until 1934. They are probably best known as the publishers of the original Raggedy Ann books, by Johnny Gruelle. On the left is a newspaper advertisement for the series of “Happy Children Books”; the Volland concept for children's stories sounds very similar to L. Frank Baum's ideal - "...books for children must not cause fright, suggest fear, glorify mischief, extenuate malice or condone cruelty."

The Perhappsy Chaps was Thompson's first published book and came out in 1918, the same year as the first Raggedy Ann book. The stories originally appeared on the children’s page of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, a weekly newspaper feature written by Thompson. On the right is a blurb that ran in a November 1918 issue of the Ledger, advertising the newly published book version of the poems.

Thompson's second book was The Princess of Cozytown, which wasn't published until 1922. This was a collection of fairy tales by Thompson, some of which had previously been published in St. Nicholas magazine. Apparently the book was already pending publication when she was contracted to continue the Oz series, and had her first Oz book published in 1921.

Both books were designed with matching pictorial boxes, like so many of the Volland publications. The books are colorful and well illustrated, with pictorial endpapers and full color illustrations throughout. The Perhappsy Chaps was illustrated by Arthur Henderson, and The Princess of Cozytown was illustrated by Janet Laura Scott. The overall effect is charming!

Original Prices

Lately I've been looking at the original pricing of the Oz books - it's trivial but interesting!

1900: Wonderful Wizard - $1.50
This was an elaborate children's book, with 24 inserted color plates and color used throughout the book. The price was a little higher than the $1.25 average at the time, but it sounds like a bargain to me!

1904 - 1916: Marvelous Land through Rinkitink - $1.25
The earlier titles had 16 color plates or color throughout the book, while titles after 1913 were standardized with 12 color plates. So, while the price stayed the same, there was a definite cutback in printing costs.

1917:  Lost Princess - $1.35
This was a price increase as America entered World War I. This was also the period when sales of the Oz books began to climb, after a few slack years.

1918 - 1919: Tin Woodman and Magic - $1.50
Another increase along with the end of World War I.

1920 - 1924:  Glinda through Grampa - $2.00
This period was a height of Oz popularity, and the books achieved the highest prices charged prior to 1950. The jump to $2.00 in 1920 was a substantial increase, and this price can be seen on the dustjacket spines of other Oz books published that year. In fact, it's an easy way to date a jacketed book to 1920!

1925 - 1930: Lost King through Yellow Knight - $1.60
A considerable price drop from the previous titles, even before the start of the Great Depression in 1929. I have 2 non-Oz titles by Baum from 1930, both of which are priced at $1.00 - John Dough and Sea Fairies. Clearly the less familiar titles were fading as Oz continued.

1931 - 1932: Pirates and Purple Prince - $1.75
A price raise in the midst of the Great Depression - but not for long!

1933 - 1942: Ojo through Lucky Bucky $1.50
This is the longest period with one price, and the lowest price for the books since 1919!  Color plates were dropped after Wishing Horse in 1935, which would have affected printing costs.

1946: Magical Mimics - $1.75
1949: Shaggy Man - $2.00
1951: Hidden Valley - $2.50
1963: Merry Go Round - $3.95 - all older titles were priced @ $3.50
As the series continued, prices increased regularly. Still, over a 63 year span, prices stayed relatively level!

1976 Oz

While digging around in the basement recently, I ran across my Bicentennial scrapbook. As a teenager outside Philadelphia in 1976, I was fascinated by the 200th birthday celebration - although I quickly grew more fascinated by the earlier Centennial and Sesquicentennial celebrations. These had included World Fairs held in Philadelphia, rather than random events around the region - but there were still a lot of things to see and do that summer.

At any rate, aside from the various newspaper accounts of celebration events, there were two particular clippings I included in the book. The first is the obituary for Ruth Plumly Thompson, from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Thompson died on April 6th, 1976. I had only recently re-discovered the Oz books at that point, and had never read a Thompson title - at that time, her books simply were not available. I had already started rummaging through used book stores in the area, but had had little success in finding much Oz related material. I still remember my surprise at learning that she had lived in the region!

The other clipping is from an answer column that ran in the paper. This one is interesting as it's from a woman whose mother owned a house in Chittenango, NY, where she believed the author of The Wizard of Oz had once lived. The paper agreed that the house sounded like Roselawn, L. Frank Baum's childhood home, and suggested contacting Oz Club member Ray Powell for more information. This coming weekend is the 33rd annual Oz-Stravaganza! celebration in Chittenango - an event that started in 1978, a couple years after this column was printed!

Neill Endpapers

After posting about some of W. W. Denslow's endpaper designs, it's only fair to look at some of John R. Neill's work. One of the great things about the Oz series is the quantity of illustrations, which spill over to preliminary pages and onto the endpapers of the books. Only one Oz book was published without pictorial endpapers, The Wishing Horse of Oz from 1935.
Neill found a number of ways to incorporate the Oz logo into quite a few of his endpaper designs. The first two shown are the early ornate color endpapers seen in Dorothy and the Wizard and The Road to Oz. Oz titles through Tik-Tok of Oz all included color in the endpapers, as part of the unique features of the books.

Beneath these, we see Grampa in Oz, using the logo as a border element, and The Hungry Tiger of Oz where the Oz logo seems to have been dropped into the picture for no particular reason.

In the four examples above, Neill used simple bold images featuring the logo and characters from the stories - The Lost King of Oz, Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, The Silver Princess in Oz and Lucky Bucky in Oz.

Below, The Cowardly Lion of Oz uses it subtly, as decoration on the lion's blanket, and The Giant Horse of Oz has one of my favorite designs - a wild game of hoops, featuring the logo in various sizes!

Chicago 1933

Since L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in Chicago, and the Oz books were published there, it seems only appropriate that the 1933-34 Chicago World's Fair would make use of Oz characters in the children's area called The Enchanted Island. This was basically an amusement park, and among the attractions were over-sized statues of favorite children's book characters, including the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman.

Here are a pair of postcards, the one above showing the entire park and the one on the left featuring the Scarecrow statue (or Strawman as he was called on the back of the card). In the lower left of the color card, the figures of the Tin Woodman and Scarecrow can be made out - both statues are in different poses than the finished structures. These statues were unique enough to be featured on a souvenir key sold at the fair - the Scarecrow can be seen standing on the left among the figures.

During the run of the fair, a puppet show written by Ruth Plumly Thompson and titled The Magical Land of Oz was performed by the Jean Gros marionettes - for more on Gros, see this blog entry: November 8, 2008. The Spring 1997 Baum Bugle contains an article about Oz at the fair by William Stillman, with additional images.

Ozoplaning with the Wizard

Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz was published in 1939, and ended Ruth Plumly Thompson's run of Oz books for Reilly & Lee. As this was the year of the MGM movie, an attempt was made to benefit from the publicity surrounding the film.

The cover is interestingly generic, and was designed with the Wizard, Scarecrow, and Tin Woodman prominently featured. The title The Wizard of Oz appears in large letters - Ozoplaning With is almost an afterthought.

The Oz characters of the story are all pulled from those present in the first book - but rather than using the more familiar characters, primary roles were given to Jellia Jamb and the Soldier with the Green Whiskers. It's nice to see these secondary figures on an adventure of their own. Hungry Tiger Press has recently published a new edition of this title.

Thompson would write two more Oz titles. In the 1970's The International Wizard of Oz Club printed Yankee in Oz, and The Enchanted Island of Oz, both with illustrations by Dick Martin. New editions of both of these books are currently available from the club.

Silver Princess in Oz

The Silver Princess in Oz, from 1938, was the second to last Oz book written by Ruth Plumly Thompson for Reilly & Lee. She also published King Kojo this year, possibly looking for an alternative to the Oz series as she was getting tired of working with Reilly & Lee - after all, this was her 18th Oz book, four more than L. Frank Baum had written.

The story veers towards science fiction, as the Silver Princess herself is from another planet - or to be more precise, Anuther Planet. Of course, magic in Oz has always had a technological bent, so this blends in very nicely.

Since color plates were no longer in use, John R. Neill had found another way to create memorable images; in the final Oz books he illustrated, he used a few double page spreads for effect.

The first editions of this book used metallic silver ink in the title on the cover and dust jacket - a nice touch, and something that hadn't been done since The Sea Fairies in 1911. The spine of the dust jacket on this book, as well as the previous title Handy Mandy, dispenses with the small image of the main character's head that had been present on all previous Thompson titles.

I always thought it was a little odd that Handy Mandy's head was used on the spine of the book itself - when the International Wizard of Oz Club published their reprint edition of this title in 1990, they corrected that error with an image of the princess on the spine of both the book and the dust jacket.

Captain Salt and Handy Mandy

Captain Salt in Oz, from 1936, was the first Oz book without color plates (not counting Road to Oz, which didn't have color plates but did feature pages of different colors of paper). This is also the only Oz story that never quite gets around to arriving in Oz itself. The characters are all Thompson's own, with no Scarecrow, Tinman or other traditional Oz celebrities - but as the main characters were already introduced in Pirates in Oz, the book fits right into the series.

I've always liked the way John R. Neill used the ship's wheel to create the word Oz for the cover title - this is the only time he did anything of that sort.

Handy Mandy, from 1937, is one of the odder characters Thompson came up with. A girl with seven hands takes a bit of getting used to - but I've always liked this book. Thompson's writing can be fairly slapdash at times, but the overall breeziness is enjoyable.

The spine of Handy Mandy in Oz used a stamped image of the main character's head. This same head was used the following year on Silver Princess in Oz. I also have a circa 1939 copy of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz with the same head. Handy Mandy got around!

Wishing Horse

The Wishing Horse of Oz, from 1935, was the last Oz title issued with color plates. It's a shame that the color illustrations were dropped from later books, but this was the Depression and I'm sure costs needed to be cut. Ruth Plumly Thompson also thought it was unfortunate that the plates were discontinued, but at this point she was unhappy about several aspects of the Oz series, particularly Reilly & Lee's lack of promotion of the books.

John R. Neill drew a horse, way back in his Nip & Tuck comic page of 1909, that looks very similar to the cover of this book. Of course, Neill drew a great many horses over his career, so it's not too surprising that some should resemble each other!

The white dustjacket for this book almost slips back to the former style of jacket, less colorful than the past several books. But this does make it stand out from other titles on the shelf!

Magic Umbrellas

When thinking of traveling by umbrella, Mary Poppins is the first image to pop into my mind - due mainly to the Disney movie, rather than the books. But L. Frank Baum introduced a magic umbrella for traveling in 1912, in Sky Island, and in 1934, the same year that Poppins was published, Ruth Plumly Thompson introduced Umbrella Island in Speedy in Oz. The entire island travels through the air, and is covered by a huge umbrella.

In his afterword for the International Wizard of Oz club edition of Speedy in Oz, Fred Meyer calls out the various umbrellas Thompson made use of in her Oz stories. He mentions seven in all, some magical and some not, but Umbrella Island certainly is the largest.

Incidentally, I find it interesting that Button Bright's umbrella in Sky Island has an elephant head for a handle, just as Mary Poppins' umbrella has a parrot head. I suppose unique umbrellas need unique handles!

King Kojo

King Kojo has the look and feel of an Oz book, with its colorful cover, dust jacket and illustrations, but this story published in 1938 was Ruth Plumly Thompson's attempt to break away from Oz. The book was published by David McCay, and illustrated by Marge, a close friend of Thompson's and the creator of Little Lulu.

The story - or series of stories - could easily fit in an Oz book, possibly taking place in one of the little kingdoms created by Thompson throughout the land. The same fanciful sense is present - there's even a comment by a character stating that "ogres melt in salt water, just like witches" - certainly a variation on an Ozian theme.

The color plates are bright, and Marge's work is energetic, if in a very different style than John R. Neill. Some of her artwork makes me think of James Thurber, particularly Dorcas the giant figurehead!

Ojo And Speedy

Here are two more titles by Ruth Plumly Thompson, Ojo in Oz from 1933 and Speedy in Oz from 1934.
Ojo fills in the back story of a character first introduced by L. Frank Baum in 1913, in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, while Speedy continues the adventures of one of Thompson's boy heroes.

In Ojo, Thompson is working hard to fill in gaps of Ozian history left by Baum. Several of her books serve this purpose, some more successfully than others. This book takes an underused character and gives him some new adventures, which is always fun.








I like John R. Neill's endpaper illustrations, featuring some very fanciful gypsy caravans, and I also think the color plates in this book are particularly nice.

With Speedy, Thompson is writing almost entirely for her own original characters, and stays away from Oz for much of the book - most of the story takes place in the air. The Emerald City and traditional characters don't appear until the final two chapters. I do think Terrybubble, the living dinosaur skeleton, is a worthy addition to the Oz inhabitants!