Monday, May 14, 2012

Map of Oz Monday - Surprise! Surprise!

Well, my friends, in last week's post on the Coloring Contest Map I mentioned that I had never seen a copy of the map that included the "printed instructions" that the publicity articles in The Ozmapolitan describe. Yesterday a reader sent me a scan of the "real" Coloring Contest Map.

Click to Enlarge

There are several points of interest. In addition to the Oz book prizes for best overall map (showing corrections, additions, coloring, etc.), there are also ten "Consolation Prizes" consisting of boxes of colored Oz stationery for maps that are only colored in neatly. I wonder what this Oz stationery was? Do any sets survive in their boxes?

Another surprise was that the compass-rose is back to its 1914 east-is-left position! This is quite unexpected, considering the 1920 "Giveaway Map" flipped Baum's compass to the traditional directions. The Map of the Surrounding Countries was probably printed on the other side of this map.

This also raises the question of when the maps I showed last week were actually issued. I have seen those maps described as the "Coloring Contest Map" many times - yet now that we know what the "Coloring Contest Map" really looks like, clearly the plain black-and-white map (with no printed directions) is something else. Probably they are the maps issued after the "Coloring Contest" was finished. Yet the 1928 issue of The Ozmapolitan makes no mention of the new maps being prepared. And why after all the fuss of the coloring contest didn't the publishers update the maps in any way other than flipping the compass back to the east-is-right compass?

So that's my little correction for this week. (Click here for the next Oz Map blog post.)

2 comments:

Cindy said...

I remember a letter from RPT saying she had run out of color maps, but had some black and white ones to send to her correspondent, so maybe the alleged "coloring contest maps" were just give aways from Reilly & Less.

David Maxine said...

I'm sure the plain map is still R&L and I know RPT used to give them away - there was a stash of them in her papers when she died. I suspect these were printed soon after the "coloring" maps.