Monday, October 11, 2010

The Purple Dragon

I've always thought that The Purple Dragon and other Fantasies was a much under-appreciated Baum book. This anthology was put together by David L. Greene for Fictioneer Books in 1976.

The volume contains stories from Baum's A New Wonderland (1900), Mother Goose in Prose (1897), American fairy Tales (1901), and a few of Baum's animal fairy tales from The Delineator magazine.The book is very handsome. It's bound in light lavender cloth stamped in dark purple, and it has multiple interior illustrations, pictorial endpapers, and a dustwrapper drawn by Tim Kirk.

Kirk has worked for Hallmark and Disney and was a Senior Designer at Tokyo DisneySea. In his early year he won five Hugo Awards for "Best Fan Artist."

I got the chance to meet him a while back at a Fantasy/Science Fiction Con and asked him to sign my copy of Purple Dragon.

Tim Kirk happily obliged, and I got a sketch of the Purple Dragon, too!

2 comments:

Ozmahime said...

What a cute dragon kinda reminds me of the Jabberwock.

I need more Baum books.

Brewski In Oz said...

Eric and David,

For the longest time I have been searching for the first chapter of 'A New Wonderland'. I have a nice copy of 'The Magical Monarch of Mo', but when looking for 'A New Wonderland' and finding it out of my price range for now, knew I had seen Phunnyland mentioned somewhere long ago.

I have my winter project of putting all of my eclectic library of book I have collected over the years, into Brodart dust jacket covers. Tonight, I covered my copy of 'The Purple Dragon and other Fantasies' and took a few minutes to peruse it and lo and behold was so happy to see it contained the first chapter from 'A New Wonderland' before Mr. Baum changed it from Phunnyland to Mo. Very thankful to have this book.