Blog 500! Happy Holidays!

Well, this is my 500th blog post here. For those that are curious about such things Hungry Tiger Talk has had 239,939 page views and received 1211 comments. To celebrate here is a charming Christmas advertisement from the Indianapolis Journal, December 15, 1902.

Click to enlarge.

This fine advertisement of good books for the holidays back in 1902 promotes two of L. Frank Baum's titles, describing The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus as "a book for which all the little ones have been waiting for generations and generations." The page also advertises Baum's The Master Key saying, "Never was a better story written for boys . . . This prince of story tellers has related a story of adventure so filled with wonders that rare will be the boy who does not find it fascinating."And while Life and Adventures is shown on the Christmas tree above three times, The Master Key isn't shown at all. If you click on the image above you can explore the image in detail.

We have another holiday treat for you over on our sister blog Hungry Tiger Tales, where we present Christmas with the Prince, a Pumperdink story by Ruth Plumly Thompson first published in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, December 21, 1919. Another fun read on the blog is Jack Snow's holiday story, The Animal's Christmas Tree which you can read by clicking here.

And finally, go check out our internet radio station, Emerald City Radio which has been nicely spiced up with some Ozzy Christmas listening including a selection of Christmas carols sung by Stephanie Mills, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" sung by Judy Garland, and "Toyland" which was first sung by Bessie Wynn in Victor Herbert's Babes in Toyland. Bessie, of course, created the part of Sir Dashemoff Daily in the 1903 Wizard of Oz just before she created the part of TomTom in Babes in Toyland. Click here to listen  or simply click the "play" arrow in the Emerald City Radio window at the top of the right hand column in this blog.

This blog has been a lot of fun to wrote over the past five years, and I am glad to be posting regularly again. Several blog sequences have proved to be very popular, such as Map of Oz Monday, White Edition Wednesday, and the amusingly critical reviews of the preposterous Bradford Exchange reprints of the Baum Oz books. And there's lots of other cool stuff in these 500 various posts - go explore for a bit!

Happy Holidays from Hungry Tiger Press!