White Rats and Genealogy

It's certainly been a while since I wrote an Oz blog! Now that I'm retired as "Mr. Winkie Convention" perhaps I'll be able to do this blogging thing a trifle more frequently.

Today, I'm sharing a recent acquisition to the Tiger Den - a lovely copy of Rachel Cosgrove's 1963 novel, Not For Glory.

It's actually a pretty decent book - perhaps most interesting to an Oz fan for its biographical insight into the life of its author. This "career" novel is set in a pharmaceutical lab. And Rachel Cosgrove herself had been trained as a biologist and worked for many years in a pharmaceutical lab before she turned to writing full-time. And main character, Faye Viccars, works a lot with white rats who are obviously cousins of beloved Oz rat, Percy.

In addition to being a "career" novel the book is also a mystery, which was one of Rachel's favorite types of tale to tell. And this book came with a small mystery of its own!

The book is actually a presentation copy inscribed by Cosgrove: "To Aunt Linnie and Uncle Chester."

Laid inside the book was a typed letter from Rachel to the apparent relatives dated February 26, 1965. It said, "Dear Aunt Linnie - I thought that you and Uncle Chester might enjoy my latest book. Love, Rachel"

Having known Rachel quite well, and being curious who the book had belonged to, I emailed Cosgrove's son and asked him about Aunt Linnie and Uncle Chester. He didn't recognize their names, but suggested they were probably from the Cosgrove side of the family. Somehow, the fact that he didn't know who these relatives were made me even more curious! What to do?

Go to Ancestry.com and poke around the Cosgrove family tree! Fairly quickly Eric Shanower and I found Linnie and Chester!

Linnie L. Brake was born in 1877. She was the sister of Rachel's mother, Martha P.  Brake, thus Rachel's true Aunt.  Linnie married Chester Malone Cunningham (1870-1965). I don't know if Uncle Chester ever got a chance to read Not for Glory. The book was sent to him in February of 1965 and he died that June at the age of 95.

Aunt Linnie had a good deal more time to read her niece's novel as she lived until 1977 when she died at age 100 - two month's shy of her 101st birthday.

Now perhaps this quest for information has been a bit of a detour away from the yellow brick road, but oddly I found it quite fascinating to be able to track down so much information on that brief moment in 1965 when a Royal Historian of Oz sent her latest book to a very elderly Aunt and Uncle she cared about. As Percy the white rat might say, "Neato, kid!"

Happy Birthday, Rachel!

Reshared December 11, 2025

on what would have been Rachel's 103rd Birthday!

Edward Einhorn, Eric Shanower, Rachel Cosgrove Payes, & David Maxine.

Today would have been Rachel Cosgrove Payes's 93rd Birthday. She is, of course, the author of Hidden Valley of Oz (1951). I began corresponding with her in the late 1970s, and we finally met for a visit in 1985. But in the early 1990's Rachel became a much bigger part of Eric Shanower's and my lives. Eric had begun work illustrating Rachel's second Oz book The Wicked Witch of Oz (1993), and she began attending the Munchkin Conventions on the east coast. Soon after Wicked Witch came out Eric and I moved to New Jersey and I began Hungry Tiger Press. I asked Rachel for a new Oz story for the premiere issue of Oz-Story Magazine and she wrote one for me!

Eric and I had Oz-story publication parties and Rachel and her husband Norman would attend, always bringing a bottle of wine, maybe some cookies, and usually Rachel would make us an elaborate greeting card.  She also gave us a "Statue of David" refrigerator magnet that still adorns our fridge. The photo at the top of this blog post is from the Oz-Story No. 3 Party in 1997.

Rachel R. Cosgrove - 1942

In thinking about what I might share with you on Rachel's special day, I realized I had never seen a youthful picture of Rachel, so I hit up my genealogical resources and located a few. Here she is at nineteen, in the 1942 West Virginia Wesleyan College yearbook (she graduated in 1943).

I recognized Rachel immediately without having to go to the name index on the photo spread. She has the same wonderfully friendly but very determined look I so well remember her for.

There were a few other images in the yearbook, too. I especially like the image below showing Rachel relaxing on the campus lawn. The photo, presented in the fore-matter of the year book, is captioned: "And Rachel finally gets some E's . . ." Alas, I have no idea at all what that means!

Rachel R. Cosgrove at West Virginia Wesleyan College, 1942.

She can also be seen in the Sigma Alpha Sigma photo. Rachel is in the upper left.

Rachel died October 10, 1998. She was only seventy-five.

You can read quite a few other blog posts about Rachel and her books by clicking here.

Happy birthday, Kiddo!

Hungry Tiger Press has acquired all of the remaining copies of The Wicked Witch of Oz and this wickedly funny Oz book is beautifully illustrated by Eric Shanower - who will be signing each copy purchased thru our website. 

Come take a look!

And check out our other NEW RELEASES, too!

Copyright© 2016, 2025 David Maxine. All rights reserved.

Pseudonym for Psex

Please note that today's blog post contains some mature subject matter.

It is always fun to finally acquire a super rarity for one's Oz collection! One can look forward to sharing the new treasure, gloating a bit, and relishing the looks of Ozian envy in the eyes of one's Ozzy friends. Or maybe not.

The most recent addition here in the Tiger Den is a mass market paperback called Playing for Keeps by Joanne Kaye and published in 1982 by Playboy Press.

My more cultured readers probably know why this book belongs in every Oz collection. It was, in fact, written by Rachel Cosgrove Payes, author of Hidden Valley of Oz and The Wicked Witch of Oz.

Rachel wrote well over forty other books: mysteries, "career" novels, and many romance novels. She published under multiple variants of her name: Rachel Cosgrove, Rachel C. Payes, and a half dozen science fiction novels under the name E. L. Arch (an anagram of Rachel).

This is the only Joanne Kaye book that Rachel wrote. I have no idea who wrote the others, but Rachel explicitly stated that this was her only Joanne Kaye novel, though the book is #5 in a series of at least six. Kaye does not seem to be a real person, but is instead a "house name" for Playboy Press. All six books are set in "The World of High Fashion," and from the ads in the back of the book I suspect they all revolve around the main character, Suzanna Blake.

OK, you ask, why did I play up the "rarity" angle in my opening lines. Well, between my collection and my BF Eric's collection we have almost every book Rachel ever wrote. We were good friends of Rachel and her husband Norman for the last ten years of her life. And I had know her casually since we began corresponding in 1980. While Rachel was still alive (she died in 1998) the only books of hers that were relatively easy to obtain were her romance novels - particularly the "bodice ripper" historical romances that she wrote in the last two decades of her life.

As much as I adored Rachel, I could not make myself wade thru such books as The Coach to Hell, and Satan's Mistress. But not long after she died it became much easier to track down her early mystery novels and science fiction via the internet. Eric and I began to snap the various titles up. They were fun, often attractive, if old-fashioned, hardcovers with quaint dust jackets. And I found that I quite enjoyed these books, as they were often loaded with little chunks of biographical detail from Rachel's own life and interests.

Well, this Playing for Keeps book just wasn't turning up. From what I can tell there has not been a single copy on eBay, Amazon, or any of the on-line book sites during the decade I've been looking. I had begun to think that maybe the book had never been published, or the name had been changed and no one told Rachel. But a few weeks ago a copy finally turned up - in Australia! The book was quite inexpensive, but the shipping charge was huge. Obviously, I bought it.

Playing for Keeps is a contemporary novel about the "World of High Fashion." The protagonist, Suzanna Blake, is an important New York fashion designer. She and Elaine Roberts, the owner of a fashion house, decide they should launch a new line of sports clothing and they need a hot young female athlete to "sponsor" the line. They focus on signing sixteen-year-old Ginny Norris, who is dating another male tennis star. There's a good deal of action involving one of the other female tennis pros, Trish Crawford, who is generally known to be gay. Thankfully Trish is one of the good guys in the story. Indeed, the villain is a vile and very homophobic columnist who is out to destroy a couple of the characters.

The book turned out to be rather interesting. Not for its plot, characters, or writing style, but because it is jam-packed with very graphic sex scenes! Pulsing, muscle-clenching, flesh-moistening, anatomically-described sex scenes written by Oz book author Rachel Cosgrove!

Rachel Cosgrove in early 1985 - a couple years after writing Playing for Keeps.

 
The protagonist sleeps with the journalist she has enlisted to introduce her to the tennis world; Elaine Roberts goes to bed with a friendly competitor; Elaine goes to bed with her friendly investor in the new sports line who has mob ties; Suzanna goes to bed with the sports journalist again; Ginny and Mark go at it with some heavy flirting which nearly turns into rape; and Ginny's step-father actually rapes both Ginny and Suzanna. There is even a graphic lesbian sex scene in which the young Ginny Norris is bedded by Trish Crawford. The next morning, Ginny is a little freaked out and goes to talk to Suzanna Blake to try and make sense of what she's done. Ginny eventually says: "What we did last night isn't natural."

Suzanna closed her eyes, thinking, Give me strength! This girl would be the death of her yet.

"Ginny, There are many different kinds of sexual love. I know that homosexuality has been a no-no in our Western society. Churches have said it was sinful. But there are places in the world, different cultures throughout history, where it has been accepted as normal. Different from some, but still just a variation. Don't feel soiled by what happened between you and Trish."

The nasty homophobic columnist has been spying and decides she can use the lesbian encounter to destroy Ginny's career. But Suzanna and her friends trick the columnist into showing up at Le Monocle, a lesbian bar in Paris, promising to give her the "proof" she needs to go public with her lesbian accusations. But instead the good guys drug the homophobic columnist, and take a series of nude photographs of her engaging in lesbian sex herself. And with the photos they blackmail the columnist into silence and forbid her to ever write anything anti-gay in her column in the future. Hooray! A happy ending!

There is a lot of very specific detail in the book about places in New York City, restaurants, clubs (they go to Michael's Pub one night and find Woody Allen jamming in a session), and there are lots of lovingly described meals and drinks in actual restaurants in both NYC and Paris. In the Paris chunk of the book, Rachel accurately describes streets, locations, hotels - and even stages the downfall of the homophobic columnist in Le Monocle, a historic Lesbian bar in Paris.

A lesbian couple at Le Monocle circa 1932.

I was curious if Rachel and her husband Norman enjoyed night-life or fine dining in New York, or if Rachel had been to Paris and written any of the Parisian locations from memory. I asked Rachel's son Robert and he replied:

I don't recall if the folks ever visited Paree; if they did, it was after my sister and I were in college. They DEFINITELY were not into fine dining, in NYC or elsewhere. (The only exception is when the Nebula Awards banquet was held in the Apple...) I would hazard a guess it was all research.  Trust me, if I'd known they were going to Paris at any point, I would've asked them to bring me home a cancan dancer!

While the food and geography seem well described, the descriptions of the various fashions leave a lot to be desired. Rachel always insisted she was "a verbal, not a visual" person. The combination of colors and fabrics seems garish and generally just tossed off by Rachel. Would a clothing designer really design a pair of sable fur tennis shorts? There's an amusing scene when Ginny laughs at them and points out how ridiculous it would be to play in a fur tennis outfit: "But Suzanna, who can play tennis in fur bloomers? I'd get so hot I'd probably faint." Suzanna replies: "Wait until my sample maker does the originals in suede and fur, satin and leather. The tennis world may never be the same again!"

And that, my readers, is the tale of Playing for Keeps. Isn't it curious where the yellow brick road can lead a person?

Happy Birthday, Rachel Cosgrove!

Today, December 11, 2011, would have been Rachel Cosgrove Payes's 89th birthday.

In the summer of 1979 I finally obtained a copy of her first book The Hidden Valley of Oz (not a first edition) and after reading it I wanted to write Rachel Cosgrove and get my book signed. I wrote Fred Meyer, then secretary of the Oz Club, for her address, but he warned me she'd probably not answer as she hated Oz and hated Oz fans. But he sent me her address and I decided to try my luck.

Click to Enlarge

I got an immediate reply from Rachel and she couldn't have been more charming. She even doodled little pictures of her characters Percy and Spots from Hidden Valley at the bottom of the letter. She happily agreed to autograph my book and signed the letter "Oz forever!"

It turns out she didn't dislike Oz or dislike Oz fans - she disliked Fred Meyer. When the Oz Club was founded in the late 1950s Fred had written to Rachel asking if she'd like to join. She politely declined for various reasons, including having two young children to raise. But Fred kept badgering her - and he really kept badgering her to send him a copy of her then-unpublished second Oz book, The Wicked Witch of Oz. She finally had to read him the riot act - asking him to leave her alone - something that I'm sure she could do quite well! And Fred wrote her off as an Oz hater.

Now, Rachel did indeed have a problem understanding grown men devoting their lives to Oz. She repeatedly said, "Oz is for kids." Rachel also had great trouble comprehending what she called "the collector mentality." But to some extent these were just sound bytes Rachel would toss out. Anyone who makes herself a Wicked Witch of the South costume (pointy hat included) and delights in showing off her silver high heels (as silver slippers) must have a big streak of Ozzy fandom running through her veins. 

So back to that first letter from 1979. I sent Rachel my copy of Hidden Valley and she signed it. We struck up a pen-pal sort of correspondence, exchanging a couple letters a year and birthday and Christmas cards. In early 1985 I was going to be in New York State and I wrote and asked if I might pay her a visit. She said she'd be delighted. Rachel was living in Shrub Oak, New York, about half an hour north of NYC. She welcomed me in, we talked for a bit, she showed me the shelves that held copies of all of her books (almost forty titles at that time), and we also looked at her research library which she used in writing the gothic romance novels she wrote in her latter years.

Rachel Cosgrove Payes in her living room, January 1985.

The most surprising thing about the visit was finding Rachel had a bad foot. She had fought a serious battle with cancer a couple decades before, and the experimental chemo that saved her life dissolved some bones in her foot. She got around fine, and her foot never stopped her from doing extensive world travel or going dancing with her husband Norman. I had acquired a first edition of Hidden Valley by this time and I brought it along, hoping she would sign it. She happily agreed to do so.

We continued to exchange notes on occasion - especially after I started attending NYU. But in the summer of 1990 our relationship kicked into higher gear. Eric Shanower and I had just started living together and suddenly Eric was asked by the Oz Club to illustrate Rachel's Wicked Witch of Oz. The Oz Club had just gotten the rights to reprint Hidden Valley of Oz, too. Rachel decided to attend the Munchkin Convention that year and her Ozzy renaissance began. She and Eric wrote back and forth quite a bit while he was illustrating the book, Rachel became a regular at the Munchkin Convention, and in 1994 I asked her to write something Ozzy for the first issue of my forthcoming anthology Oz-story. A few months later a long short story arrived in the mail, "Percy and the Shrinking Violet."

Eric, Rachel, and David at the OZ-STORY No. 1 Publication Party - June 1995

She wrote me another story, "Spots in Oz," for Oz-story No. 3. She and Norman had become good friends. Eric and I held publication parties for each issue of Oz-story and Rachel and Norman always came. Rachel often brought little hand-made gifts and bottles of wine, she baked Hidden Valley muffins for us, she went to a lot of trouble to track down a refrigerator magnet set she thought Eric and I needed - it was a Michelangelo Statue of David magnet complete with removable Santa suit! It's on our current refrigerator still. Every few weeks Eric and I would get a letter (sometimes addressed to our dog) and Rachel would have scribbled some complaint about writing, clipped a cartoon, and thrown in some coupons for something she thought we might need. Rachel was no longer the Royal Historian of Oz - she'd just become a good friend.

Happy Birthday, Rachel.

Detours on the Yellow Brick Road

One thing I most like about both Eric's and my Oz collections is that each have many little sub-collections - detours down forks on the yellow brick road that most Oz collectors have never traveled down.

One such Ozzy detour is our interest in Rachel Cosgrove Payes's non-Oz writing. While Oz fans know her for her two Oz books, The Hidden Valley of Oz (1951) and The Wicked Witch of Oz (1993), she also wrote over forty other novels and a lot of short fiction.

While I'm not particularly interested in the Gothic Romance novels she wrote in her latter years, I do have a fondness for her Science Fiction novels (published under the psuedonym E. L. Arch), her Mystery novels, and a small handful of her YA "Career" novels, many of which are quite enjoyable.

Another strong side-road in my Oz collection is foreign editions of the Oz books - I probably have about three hundred at this point, dating from the early 1930s on up to brand-new in 2012.

Today I got a new item that fits in both side-collections - a German edition of Rachel Cosgrove's Bridge to Yesterday, an SF novel first published by Avalon in 1963.  I had expected a regular paperback book to arrive, but this German edition, titled Verlorene Vergangenheit (The Lost Past), was published in 1964 in a dime-novel series called Utopia - a series devoted to Zukunftsroman (future stories). It's very thin, stapled at the spine, with the text printed in two columns on newsprint - it feels like a slightly undersized old-fashioned comic book.

I like the German cover much better than the American cover. The scene depicted is when Leo Tenney and a man he's been chasing run smack into the Minotaur (a bull, anyway) in the Labyrinth at a sort of futuristic theme park which reminded me of Michael Crichton's Westworld - though Cosgrove's theme park predates Crichton's by a decade.

One odd thing in the German edition is a list of the main characters and who they are in the story - well, it gives away a huge amount of the plot, so if you're planning on reading Bridge to Yesterday in German, here's a major spoiler alert! There is a short bonus story at the end of the volume, The Celestial Blueprint by Philip José Farmer.

You can read more about the American edition of Bridge to Yesterday in this previous blog post.

So, dear readers, do you have any odd little detours in YOUR Oz collections?

Who Stole the Sexing Stones?

I just finished reading Rachel Cosgrove's SF novel The Deathstones, published by Avalon Books in 1964. As with all of Rachel's SF for Avalon, the book was published under her pseudonym E. L. Arch. Most of my readers know that Rachel Cosgrove was the fifth Royal Historian of Oz, author of The Hidden Valley of Oz and The Wicked Witch of Oz. I've kind of gotten onto a Cosgrove kick lately. I had to dig thru my Cosgroviana a few weeks ago to find a checklist of Rachel's work for a friend who's been bit by the research bug. I wish him lots of luck and much fun!

But as I was saying, I just finished reading The Deathstones. The novel begins on the planet Isis in the Ranian system. Captain Jack Landers is looking for a crew for his small spaceship, the Motley. He and his first-mate hire three peculiar aliens to crew the ship, and yes, Rachel makes a joke about the Motley Crew several times. The three aliens are called X, Y, and Z.

X is the most interesting. He's a protoplasm blob sort of like Odo from Deep Space Nine, except that X can't take other forms. X is a native of the planet Isis. The species is quite intelligent, but can't communicate directly with humans. They can, however, absorb information or instructions if they are in direct physical contact with the person thinking said information. These Ranians (the blobs) have no gender until they make a pilgrimage to the Temple of the Sexing Stones. They enter the temple as grey blobs and leave as either bright red or deep violet blobs who must then mingle with a blob of the opposite color.

Well, Captain Landers is hired by six humans to take them to Osiris (the most distant planet in the system). The bulk of the novel plays out on the crowded little spaceship. The passengers consist of five men and one woman; Captain Landers is none too pleased to have a woman on board. His attitude is very misogynistic, as are the attitudes of the other male passengers. Oddly, the woman is in fact kind of awful. I kept hoping Rachel would redeem her or address the sexist attitudes of the men, but she did not. At one point Amanda says, "I'm such a dope about mechanical things . . . I need a man around to help me." She's simpering, ditzy, and manipulative. Within a few chapters someone has killed her and the book plays out as a murder mystery.

But wait, there's a subplot! Halfway through the journey they hear over the news service that Isis is in chaos - the Sexing Stones have been stolen! Without them the gray blobs will never discover their genders, won't be able to "intermingle" with the opposite color, and there will be no more baby blobs. But in the end the Sexing Stones are found, the murderer gets what he deserves, and all ends as it should with a little help from the Deathstones.

The book was a quick and pleasant read. The grumpy pessimistic captain, the small crew, the half-dozen passengers with secrets (one of whom is a preacher), tooling around a single solar system at sub-light speed definitely reminded me of Joss Whedon's Firefly. 

I got my copy of the book many years ago, but never sat down to read it. I wish I had so I could have discussed a few things with Rachel, such as Amanda's character, which seems so odd coming from the strong, well-educated woman Rachel was. I did ask Rachel to sign my copy of The Deathstones, and I was very pleased with what she wrote. I do miss her friendship.

 

You can read about E. L. Arch's Bridge to Yesterday by clicking here.

Microcosmic Tales

Many of you know that Rachel R. Cosgrove, author of Hidden Valley of Oz (1951) and The Wicked Witch of Oz (1993), wrote romance novels as well, usually under her married name Rachel Cosgrove Payes. It's less well known that she also wrote science fiction, sometimes under her own name, and sometimes under her pseudonym, E. L. Arch (an anagram of Rachel). In today's blog I discuss an unusual SF short story included in the anthology Microcosmic Tales - 100 Wondrous Science Fiction Short-Short Stories, published by Taplinger Publishing Co. in 1980 and selected by Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander.

Rachel's contribution is called "Mattie Harris, Galactic Spy," first published in Vertex, April 1974. The story tells the tale of a voluptuous young woman named Matilda Harris (some word play on Mata Hari) who, as the title states, is an Intergalactic spy "with a emphasis on the gal." Matilda must prevent an assassination. Her suspects include a hot-blooded folk singer from Betelgeuse IV and an unsavory attaché - an arthropod named Ontha Lefnik - who is from an unfriendly planet in the Caroline series. In the end it's a very (deliberately) silly story.

Among the other ninety-nine tales are several written by people with strong Oz connections: two by Harlan Ellison (big Oz fan), one by Robert Payes (Rachel's son), one by Oz club charter member Ruth Berman, one by Philip José Farmer (author of Barnstormer in Oz), and a story by Lester Del Rey (part of the Del Rey publishing line responsible for the mass-market Baum Oz books and a dozen or so trade-paperback Thompson Oz books). The volume also includes stories by such icons as Isaac Asimov,  Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Larry Niven, William F. Nolan, and many others.

NEWSLETTER - December 2025

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

www.hungrytigerpress.store

As we begin our 31st year, we've been hard at work improving your online experience with Hungry Tiger Press—improving our shopping cart and shipping calculator.

If you're looking for an Ozzy holiday gift, what better choice than our beautiful paperback edition of L. Frank Baum's Life and Aventure of Santa Claus, featuring green pages, red running titles and beautifully illustrated in full color by Eric Shanower? We've also recently acquired all the remaining stock of Ruth Plumly Thompson's Curious Cruise of Captain Santa, illustrated by John R. Neill. And with our Holiday Special, you can get both books for 20% off!

And for those who need more wickedness in their lives - we've obtained all remaining copies of The Wicked Witch of Oz by Rachel Cosgrove Payes, sumptuously illustrated by Eric Shanower. For more grown-up wickedness, check out our great new collection of Bram Stoker stories, Dracula's Guest and Other Deadly Tales, illustrated by Eric Shanower in creepiest black-and white!

We also have a very limited supply of the first nine Oz books by Ruth Plumly Thompson, as printed by Del Rey in 1985. All are first printings in like-new condition. Only $9.99 each!

Lastly, we have only two copies left of the Marvel Comics adaptation of The Road to Oz, adapted by Eric Shanower and drawn by Skottie Young. Eric will sign and draw a small sketch in each copy purchased.

Don't forget that every month we bring you stories and verse by the Royal Historians of Oz--for free! Click here to read them online at Hungry Tiger Tales.

Check out our newest listings below—we also have several great new books coming for you in 2026.

We're doing our best to earn our stripes!

www.hungrytigerpress.store

Double the Santa Fun!

Get both L. Frank Baum's Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, beautifully illustrated by Eric Shanower in full-color—and Ruth Plumly Thompson's The Curious Cruise of Captain Santa, illustrated by John R. Neill, for 20% off—now thru Christmas Day. Both books are also available separately. Check it out!

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus

What could be better than a biography of Santa Claus written by L. Frank Baum! Our beautiful new paperback edition of the timeless Christmas classic includes Baum’s charming sequel story “A Kidnapped Santa Claus,” presenting Santa’s entire merry history.

Award-winning illustrator Eric Shanower brings Santa’s story to life in twelve lovely full-color full-page paintings in this delightful new edition. Specially redesigned for this new Hungry Tiger Press edition, the handsome volume features light green paper, colorful chapter headings, and several brand-new illustrations. Check it out!

A Thompson Treat!

Very Limited Supply!

We just acquired a supply of the first nine Ruth Plumly Thompson Oz books as issued by Del Rey in the mid-1980s. These “like new” copies may be forty years old - but they look like they were printed yesterday! Each are first printings of the Del Rey paperbacks, featuring the now beloved cover paintings by Michael Herring. Check it out!

We're offering them for only $9.99 each! While Supplies Last!

Dracula's Guest and Other Deadly Tales

Eric Shanower’s 42 moody illustrations bring new chills to five of the deadliest tales by Bram Stoker, author of the classic vampire story Dracula.

A mother’s fury erupts in grisly revenge in “The Squaw.” Weird rites cling to a scene of murder in Stoker’s recently rediscovered tale “Gibbet Hill.” What’s that scratching inside the walls of “The Judge’s House”? Silent jealousy lurks behind the scenes while death takes center stage in “A Star Trap.” In the title story, “Dracula’s Guest,” unsuspecting Jonathan Harker suffers a foretaste of vampiric terror. Soaked in blood and feeding on fright, these tales beg to be read alone and late at night. Check it out!

Wicked, indeed!

The Wicked Witch of Oz

by Rachel Cosgrove Payes - Illustrated by Eric Shanower

The Wicked Witch of the South is awake again after a hundred-year nap, and now she’s plotting revenge against Dorothy Gale! But Dorothy and Percy, the giant white rat, are determined to thwart these plans of the last and wickedest Wicked Witch in Oz. 

The large hardcover is bound in red cloth stamped in white, features two-tone pictorial endpapers, and is profusely illustrated by Eric Shanower, who brings the Wicked Witch and our Ozzy friends to life in his most intricate pen-and-ink style.

This is the original printing of the book and each copy will be signed by Eric Shanower.  Check it out!

Happy Holidays!

Copyright © 2025 David Maxine. All rights reserved.

Bridge to Yesterday

I recently read Bridge to Yesterday (1963), a science fiction novel written by a certain E. L. Arch.

If you've been eating your Magic Muffins and using your memory you probably know that E. L. Arch is in fact Rachel R. Cosgrove, author of The Hidden Valley of Oz (1951). E. L. Arch is an anagram of "Rachel."

Rachel wrote quite a bit of SF in the early 1960s under this pseudonym and a fair amount of short SF under her own married name, Rachel Cosgrove Payes, throughout the 1970s and '80s.

A few passages in Bridge to Yesterday really jumped out at me. Early in the book the two main characters go to Jupiter's moon, Ganymede, in search of a man working on a cure for cancer. Ganymede is covered by a dense jungle. One of the characters quickly discovers that he is literally taking root in the Ganymede soil - the scene is clearly inspired by Rachel's memories of the Magic Isle in The Magic of Oz when Trot and Cap'n Bill start to take root. With no "magic" to rescue the hero the only solution is the one Trot and Cap'n Bill were so fearful of - he has to be pulled out by brute force, tearing the roots from his feet. What's particularly resonant if one knows much about Rachel's life is the fact that someone was on Ganymede looking for a cure for cancer. A few years before she wrote this book Rachel had a serious battle with cancer herself - she survived by undergoing a very early form of chemotherapy. The chemo saved her life, but did serious damage to an ankle and foot.

Later in the book the two main characters must go undercover in a prison. To my mind, the prison seems vaguely reminiscent of Tollydiggle's prison in the Emerald City. It's presented as a rehabilitation resort and treatment is referred to in the slang as "the rest cure." There are no fences or bars, and each prisoner wears a special robe and is assigned his own special guard called the "friend."  But the "rest cure" is presented as a form of torture in many ways. One is supposed to just rest and think about the crime one has committed. The prisoner is to do nothing but relax and meditate - period! The "friend" takes the prisoner out for a walk on the grounds every afternoon - but the prisoner is on a stretcher, lying prone, wheeled around by his "friend."  Even meals are spoon fed by the "friend." While on one level this seems like a parody of Tollydiggle's Oz prison - it also must surely be a satire on Rachel's long weeks in the hospital while she battled cancer. She no doubt hated her own "rest cure" with a passion.

There's another curious bit. Several times Rachel uses the phrase "shrinking violet."  This must be a phrase she liked, as "shrinking violets" became a plot device in one of her final Oz short stories, "Percy and the Shrinking Violet," published in Oz-story No. 1. 

The germ of the story was interesting, and it was an easy read, yet I couldn't help feeling frustrated that I was several steps ahead of the characters a lot of the time - especially for the last third of the novel.

A strong editor could have helped Rachel turn this story into a much better and tighter book with little effort. Alas, I suspect there was no editor and I know Rachel was paid a flat fee of only $300 to write it. Despite the fact that the book was probably written very hastily, I felt I could see Rachel enjoying herself: sometimes engaging in word play, writing a few subtle jokes, perhaps showing off some of her background as a biologist in describing the medical laboratory and the effects of the cryogenic process on the human body. 

Rachel must have enjoyed SF to some extent. I don't know for certain, but I suspect she attended several World Science Fiction Cons. She told me once that she felt very dismissed as a Science Fiction author. But she added, with a chuckle, the only time she was ever treated with respect - and a little deference - in SF circles was when her SF writing colleagues learned that she had written an Oz book.

You can read a blog review of E. L. Arch's The Deathstones by clicking here.

What's In a Name?

Many authors return to ideas again and again in their writings. The Royal Historians of Oz are no exception to the rule.

In the first chapter of The Hidden Valley of Oz by Rachel R. Cosgrove (Payes), we meet the main character, a little boy who’s busy building a kite. The boy is called Jam. On page two we learn that

Jam was really only his nickname. His full name was Jonathan Andrew Manley, so his initials spelled “Jam.”

Creating a nickname from a person’s initials isn’t unknown, but it’s fairly rare in real life. However, it isn’t all that rare in Rachel Cosgrove Payes’s fiction. Consider this passage on page twelve of Rachel’s romance novel Long Journey Home (1962), from the middle of a scene between the main character Ellen Leona Ford and her Uncle Simon.


  Even that foolish nickname Elf was so unsuited
  to her, she thought. Uncle Simon had started it
  years ago, because the initials of her full name
  spelled “elf,” but there was nothing magic
  about Ellen and she would be the first to
  admit it.

Two instances might be coincidence, but a name created from the initials of her main character turns up yet again in Rachel's books. In chapter eight of her gothic novel The Black Swan (1975) the main character Lady Margarita Elena Godoy loses her memory when her head is injured in a fall. She can’t remember any of her past. In the pocket of her dress she finds a patchbox given to her by her lover, although she can’t remember where it came from.

It was a beautiful little enameled box, with silver sides, exquisitely engraved. Turning it around in her fingers, she saw that there were initials on the box, initials formed of delicate white roses: M E G.

Then on page forty-nine, when a woman asks Lady Margarita her name, we read that

Recognizing peril in the woman’s words, she swallowed hard, trying to get rid of the lump of fear that was lodged in her throat. Who was she? She didn’t know. Then, she thought of the letters on the box hidden in her pocket. They spelled a common name.

“Of course I know who I am.” She put as much hauteur in her voice as she could muster. “My name is Meg.”

Rachel obviously wasn’t one to let a good idea go to waste. But once a decade might have been enough, since I've yet to find this naming convention in any of her other books. But there are still plenty of books to go, so we’ll see if she ever did it again.