White Edition Wednesday - LOST PRINCESS

In our last installment we sailed the seas with Rinkitink in Oz so this week we must seek out The Lost Princess of Oz.

Dick Martin added lots of little extras to Lost Princess and he pulled them from quite a variety of places so we have a lot to look at beginning with the cover.

The front cover is based on the original cover design by John R. Neill from 1917 (seen at left). Dick has redrawn it a bit, simplifying the Frogman and adjusting the byline lettering. The spine illustration is taken from the spine of the dust jacket of the first edition of The Scarecrow of Oz - which was, incidentally, the first Oz book dust jacket to have a spine vignette printed in full color (seen below right).

Excuse this slight digression, but this reminded me of a famous Dick Martin story: One day Jim Haff (long time Oz Club member and cartographer of the Oz Club's Maps of Oz) was at Dick Martin's home. Jim and Dick were sitting around discussing some obscure Ozian point and Jim asked Dick if he could see a copy of The Scarecrow of Oz to help prove some odd point.

Dick handed Jim a first printing of the book in an immaculate first-state dust jacket. Jim said, "Not that one! I can't look anything up in THAT copy! I just want to see your reading copy."

 "Sorry," said Dick, "that is my reading copy. It's the only copy of the book I own."

Dick Martin had a very fine collection.

The back cover is based one of the original Lost Princess color plates - the one showing the odd people of Thi (seen below). Dick rather radically adapted it, cutting out several of the characters, including the cute baby Thist. The faces and character of the two he kept are quite different from Neill's original. Dick didn't usually alter Neill artwork this heavily.

Let's open up the book and see what changes Dick made to the interior. For the "Famous Oz Book" ad Dick adapted Neill's cover drawing from one of the Little Wizard Series books, Ozma and the Little Wizard (1913), shown below.

And on page four Dick prepared a new drawing of the little brown bear, Corporal Waddle, adapted from another of the original Lost Princess color plates.

Left to Right: Corporal Waddle in 1917 and Corporal Waddle in 1964.

When I was a kid, the most exciting thing to me about this edition of Lost Princess was the Map of the Land of Oz that Dick added to the fore-matter. This was the first Oz map I ever saw.

Map of the Land of Oz from the "white edition" of LOST PRINCESS

I could go on and on about this map, but will save it for our new blog series, Maps of Oz Monday, which will begin in a month or so. Last week I showed you one of the two maps that Reilly & Lee issued in 1968 to publicize the "white editions." Here's the other one adapted from the map above.

1968 Map of the Land of Oz published by Reilly & Lee.

When Dick added the Oz map to Lost Princess he needed to keep it on a spread, so he added four pages to the front matter of the book. The middle spread was, of course, the Oz map. But to fill the other two pages Dick adapted the endpapers of the first edition of Patchwork Girl showing the Tin Woodman riding the Hungry Tiger and the Scarecrow riding the Cowardly Lion.

Dick Martin's adaptation for pages 13 and 16 of LOST PRINCESS.

Below you can see the image as it appeared in the first edition of Patchwork Girl. I'm not sure why Dick used the Tin Woodman picture first - but perhaps he liked the character to be looking into the book instead of out toward the margin.

Endpapers for the first edition of PATCHWORK GIRL

This image was also used in the Little Wizard series (see below). But based on the shadows under the animals, Dick seems to have used the Patchwork Girl version.

Neill's simplified version from LITTLE WIZARD STORIES OF OZ.

One odd pagination note - the first page of text begins on page 17 just like the original edition. But there are  18 pages of fore-matter before that first page of text. Not a big deal - but I noticed the discrepancy when I was checking the page numbers of the newly added Scarecrow and Tin Woodman images.

One final bit to share - Lost Princess was dedicated to L. Frank Baum's granddaughter, Ozma Baum. In 1996 Ozma and Eric and I were all participating in an Oz convention in Louisville, Kentucky, and I brought along my very first copy of Lost Princess, the "white edition," and asked Ozma to sign it for me. She very kindly did so.

It's not every day that you get an Oz book autographed by Ozma herself!

That's it for this week. Next week we'll be sliding some oil to The Tin Woodman of Oz.