Mom, I Think I Hurt my Finger . . .

Me and Zeb circa 1967 in Albuquerque at Tingley Beach.

This is the tale of my first Oz collectible, before I had any books, or records, or anything else. I am pretty sure that when I was this young I had only seen the MGM film, once, on television. I had liked the movie and I have some memory of being in the pharmacy with my mom and seeing Oz band-aids, and then mom got them for me!

Curad's OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD "Oz" bandages (1967-'68).

What I most remember was that when we got home, I wanted to look at the actual bandages, and then I wanted to put one on my finger. I think mom let me have one. But then after it got wet, or came loose, I wanted another. Mom said they were too expensive to just "wear," that I needed to save them for when I actually hurt myself.  I waited. And waited. And then twenty minutes later I was playing outside and I came running in to show some vague impression on my hand that I was sure needed a band-aid. I don't recall if I got one or not.

I think I recall my dad later than night bellowing, "Christ, what a racket! That damn company only put pictures on their band-aids so kids would want to wear 'em, and we'd go through band-aids six times as fast!"  Dad was probably right.

Curiously, I remember the bandages as being in full-color. While I haven't seen one since 1968, my memory is vivid. I remember the Wicked Witch bandage as being bright green and black. I had not seen the box since 1968 either, not until an Oz friend sold me the one above last year. The price sticker on this box is from Longs Drugs and they cost 45 cents.

I have no memories of ever seeing Off to See the Wizard, back in the 1960s. The show was produced by Chuck Jones and broadcast on ABC in 1967-'68. The Oz segments were essentially just a framing device for an anthology series that showed films such as Flipper and Clarence the Cross-eyed Lion. But I do very much remember all of the merchandising! It feels like this show produced more Oz crap than anything before the 1989 boom of MGM material.

A black-and-white clip can be seen below. I am curious why no color material is up on YouTube. There were perhaps ten episodes in good color on the 1993 MGM "Ultimate Oz" laser-disc set. Why haven't these been included in later reissues or put up on YouTube? Still, check out this samples anyway!

The first clip has only the opening, but a much better picture; the second clip has an actual "episode," including the closing credits. So watch them both!

Winkie Con Collectibles

This week the Winkie Con has been auctioning off a couple dozen Oz collectibles on eBay. all of the proceeds from the auctions will go to the Winkie Con Programming Fund.

Isn't that neat? Here's a chance to add something cool to your collection and support the the Winkie COn at the same time. Click here to see a list of the items being offered. The auctions end on Sunday afternoon at 5:30 PM Pacific time.

All of the items were donated by the family of the late Rik Thompson - a long-time Winkie who passed away earlier this year. Our thanks go out to his wife Haven, and daughter Melissa for their thoughtful generosity.

The many items date from the mid 1970s through the mid 1990s. There are many Ozzy Christmas ornaments, little dolls, stuffed Oz figures, Ozzy Russian nesting dolls - items celebrating the MGM Wizard of Oz film as well as Disney's Return to Oz.

So come on - go check out the auctions and show your support for the Winkie Con! If these auctions are successful we'll do our best to do this kind of thing again!

Click here to see all the Oz goodies up for bid!

Map of Oz Monday - the 1921 Game Board Map

Last week we looked at Reilly & Lee's 1920 promotional Oz map. Since I am trying to tackle the various Oz maps in chronological order, we've come to a very unusual map - perhaps not even a map at all in the big scheme of things. Yet it offers some points of interest - and it's very beautiful, too.

The Wonderful Game of Oz Map (1921) - Click to Enlarge

This is the board game for Parker Brothers' 1921 Wonderful Game of Oz. At first I didn't think I'd have much to say about this map, but there are a few things to point out. Most obviously this map presents Oz as a squarish country - much like the 1909 Fairylogue map - but I am fairly certain that Oz has gone square simply to accommodate the traditional shape of this sort of game-board. The shapes of the countries are clearly based on the shapes from the 1914 Oz maps (note the phallic pan handle of the Gillikin Country).

But there is a huge adjustment to this map that I'd not really considered before. The Munchkin and Winkie countries have been flipped to reflect traditional east/west positions. Both the 1914 map and the 1920 map show the Munchkins on the left (though of course those two maps disagree about where east is located on the compass). The game designer clearly knew that the Munchkins should be in the east as Baum always stated, and the designer made it so. Perhaps a brave choice, since it flew in the face of the 1920 map issued by the Oz book publisher only the previous year.

The map is also the first to show locations from almost all of Baum's Oz books. The only book not represented on the map is Glinda of Oz - there are no Skeezers or Flatheads, even though there is plenty of room for them. This makes me question when the game was being designed. Perhaps the project was begun before the publication of Glinda in the fall of 1920? I don't really know how long games were in the publication pipeline back then. Of course the Skeezers were on the 1914 map - one of the locations Baum had added to the map that he had not yet written about. So this is in fact an omission. So whether the game designer had never seen a copy of Glinda or the game was designed before Glinda's publication, we will likely never know.

Several of the locales on the map are of interest because they show us things seldom pictured in the actual Oz books - such as this full color view of the Tin Woodman's all-tin castle. This is an adaptation of Neill's drawing of the castle from The Road to Oz (1909), but I think it's neat to see it in color

The Tin Woodman's Tin Castle.

Below is a rare view of Professor Woggle-Bug's Royal Athletic College. Note the imposing statue of the esteemed insect on the point of the roof! And I love the giant mortar-board on the large dome, too.

The Royal College of Athletic Arts and Sciences.

The game-board also offered the best view we ever had of Glinda's Castle until Eric Shanower's Blue Witch of Oz.

The Castle of Glinda the Good.

There are many neat spots to explore on this game-board map. It shows so much care and love for the Oz books that I find it impossible that the designer was not a HUGE Oz fan. I wish we knew who he or she was. Another interesting point is that this map unifies the Oz series. It features the locales from The Wizard of Oz which my readers know was published by a different publisher than the rest of the Oz books. Note the Denslow-like Hammerhead to the left of Glinda's castle.

Here's one more curious spot. On the edge of the lake there is an imposing pink structure not referenced in the Oz books. I wonder what it was supposed to be? The pointy end of the lake and the anthropomorphized big tower almost look like a face and word-balloon.

That's about it for this week's map blog. But if you find this game-board intriguing and would like a chance to play The Wonderful Game of Oz, why not join us at the 2012 Winkie Convention, July 27-29 in Pacific Grove, California? Because we have a gigantic version of the game set up for your playing pleasure!

You can read all about our giant version of the game at the Winkie Convention on this previous blog post. It's a lot of fun! OK, that's it for this week. Next week we'll be looking at the 1927 Coloring Contest map.

(Click here for the next Oz Map blog post.)

John R. Neill and the Winkie Convention

Most of you know that in addition to writing this blog I am also the Programming Director for the Winkie Convention, which will be holding it's 48th annual celebration of the Baum and Oz books this July (click here for details).

I am delighted to announce that the family of Oz illustrator John R. Neill has donated an original drawing to the Winkie Con. This drawing will be auctioned off as a fundraiser for the Winkie Program Fund on Saturday evening July 28, 2012.

This wonderful and important piece of artwork was one of the last Oz drawings John R.Neill ever did. It is the best of the cover roughs for Neill's final Oz book The Runaway in Oz and also includes multiple character sketches and illustration ideas on both sides of the same sheet. Neill died in 1943 before completing the illustrations, and the book remained unpublished until 1995 when Eric Shanower picked up the baton - revising the manuscript and preparing his own new illustrations.These wonderful sketches are John R. Neill's vision for his final Oz book. So let's take a look at Neill's drawing.

Click to Enlarge!

The piece we are offering is drawn in pencil on both sides of a sheet of paper measuring 10 - 1/2" x 7 - 7/8". This side of the paper features the most detailed of Neill's cover studies for the book, showing placements for the cover lettering, indications of color: note the word "blue" at the top of the image and Neill's scribble indicating "orange" for the title lettering. Neill has indicated the position of the "credits" by drawing simple boxes at the bottom of the image - though Neill has scribbled in "L. Frank Baum" at the lower right corner. The right-hand side of the image shows Scraps and the spoolicle in another position, as well as what's likely Neill's only portrayal of his character Captain Battery-Bat. The woman drawn on the bottom edge may be Fanny the Weather Witch, although it's hard to tell since her description in Neill's original draft is vague - maybe it's the Queen of the Conse-quinces.

Click to Enlarge!

The back of the sheet of paper is jam-packed with other sketches! The left-side shows multiple facial expressions for the Friendly Cloud. You can see the Patchwork Girl and her spoolicle (very tiny) sitting on top of the uppermost cloud. The right side shows several more views of Scraps and the spoolicle - the central one is especially interesting as it shows Neill experimenting with how he would get multiple characters onto the contraption. Popla the Power Plant is holding on at back and a character who's possibly Fanny the Weather Witch is leading the parade. Scraps has her legs extended over the handlebars. At the bottom of the page are two more small sketches. I'm unsure who the character at the left is - maybe the Twinkler. The boy on the bottom right is almost certainly Alexample.

You have no doubt noticed the mathematical figuring. Neill did this a lot on his sketches. Not quite sure what he was doing, but many of Neill's sketches and the backs of his illustration boards have mathematical doodling all over them.

As I said, this is the most detailed of Neill's several cover roughs for the book, and it was this image that Eric Shanower used as inspiration for the 1995 publication of the book.

Below is another example of how Shanower incorporated Neill's roughs into the final book.

Neill's 1943 sketch at left - Shanower's 1995 drawing at right.

You can see what a truly fine and interesting piece of Oz history this is. While lots of John R. Neill artwork survives, his Oz work is still quite rare. And these preparatory studies are rarer still and perhaps most fascianting of all, as they let us into Neill's mind to see his design process. This really is a marvelous piece featuring one of Baum's most beloved characters, the Patchwork Girl.

Please note, too, that the proceeds from the sale of this drawing will go to benefit the Winkie Convention Programming Fund. The drawing was donated as a memorial to their mother by the children of Joan Neill Farnsworth, the youngest of John R. Neill's three daughters, who passed away early last year.

Portrait by John R. Neill of his daughter Joan.

The Winkie Convention is very grateful to the Neill family for this generous gift, and the monies raised through its sale will, I hope, bring Ozzy pleasure to people at the Winkie Convention for years to come.

For information on attending this year's Winkie Con click here for more details and links to download the info pack and registration forms.  I hope you'll join us!

Treasury of the Forgotten Forest!

I'm very pleased to announce the publication today of a wonderful and incredibly over-sized edition of Eric Shanower's graphic novel The Forgotten Forest of Oz.

This new "Treasury Edition" from comics publisher IDW measures 10" x 13 1/4" so that Shanower's art is printed larger than ever before, allowing full appreciation of the fine, detailed linework and the rich tones of each watercolored panel. But there's more than just the acclaimed story of The Forgotten Forest of Oz. Aside from the dramatic new cover painting, this Treasury Edition features over sixteen pages of bonus material, including previously unpublished color versions of the original endpapers, never-before-seen character sketches, the artwork and script for the very first version of this tale called "The Story of Nebelle," and the preliminary art and script for the original ending of Forgotten Forest which was quite different and hasn't been published in its entirety until now!

I'm also happy to let you know that this spectacular new reprint is available to order at our online store. And as a special offer,  the first hundred copies ordered from Hungry Tiger Press will come with a signed and numbered bookplate designed especially for this offer by Eric Shanower.

Also, if you would like your book personally autographed, Mr. Shanower has agreed to do so. Simply make the request in the "special instructions" field during checkout.

You can look at a preview of the new edition of The Forgotten Forest of Oz by clicking here.

To Visit our online-store click here.

Life as an Oz Boy

Back in the early-mid 1980s I was just starting to have an Oz collection that I was semi-proud of. I was also a bit of a closet-case, with zero social life and I had pretty much gone to live in Oz.  

Sigh . . .

Anyway, one of the ways I felt comfortable reaching out of my little oblong fairyland was by showing off my Ozzy treasures to anyone who cared to look at them. Sometimes this meant dragging house guests into the so-called  "Oz museum," but I also used the collection as a social crutch of sorts by hosting the occasional Oz party or offering to show my collection at local libraries and things.

I recently found a little stash of photos from one of the better library displays I set up. These are from a display at the Golden Valley Public Library in Minneapolis - part of the Minneapolis Public Library System. I must say that I think my collection wasn't so shabby, considering I was only nineteen years old.

I had all forty Oz books by this time and several fairly nice first editions. The Hill Wizard above is a little beat-up and is a second-state copy, but I'd gotten it at my first Winkie Convention when I was fourteen for $56, so who's complaining? The seemingly very nice copy of Ozma of Oz was great for displays - sadly there is a bullet hole right through the middle of all the pages. I guess someone set the book up on a fence - covers open - and used it for target practice. The copy of Little Wizard Stories of Oz was one of the few ultra-bargains I ever found. I got it from a local woman for fifteen bucks at a book show.

My first edition copies of Emerald City and Marvelous Land were a bit on the shabby side.

I liked mixing up the displays with a little of everything. So we get a copy of Patchwork Girl, my playing pieces for the 1921 Parker Brothers Oz game, and a miniature version I had made of the game.

I found Dick Martin's Cut-and-Assemble the Emerald City great for displays. The little buildings could always fill a dull niche. The original drawing from Forbidden Fountain of Oz was a gift from Dick Martin at my first Ozmapolitan Con.

Another mixed shelf of Oz stuff. The blue thing is a yo-yo from the Banner Elk Land of Oz theme park.

From my mid-teen years I had a strong interest in foreign editions - at last count I had about three hundred and fifty. The hard-to-see map in the background is also from the Banner Elk theme park, which I'd visited when I was thirteen.

I made the little Oz flag when I was fourteen. You can read a blog about it by clicking here, if you like. I always found pop-up books worked well in displays, too. The paper Gump (another present from Dick Martin) is a favorite, though I don't have him set up anywhere at the moment. He lives flat these days.

So here I sit - decades later - and Oz still plays a huge part in my social life. 

Sigh ...

Rachel and the Scarecrow - BLOG 400!

Oz book author Rachel Cosgrove Payes was famous for being "anti-collectible" and trumpeting her motto "Oz is for kids." Yet this same Royal Historian would eventually show up at the Munchkin Con in a Wicked Witch of the South Costume she'd made herself. She happily showed off her "Silver Slippers," a pair of silver leather sling-back pumps, with a girlish grin and twist of her ankle, and she even made a few Oz collectibles! One such was the Scarecrow shown below.

Rachel had either knit or crocheted him and brought him to the convention and donated him to the auction. Several people bid on him, but in the end the person that wanted it most was Eric Shanower. So now he lives with us.His tag (which I didn't scan) was made by Rachel and explains that she made him (I believe from a kit or pattern). I think Rachel thought the Scarecrow would be bought by a kid - but she seemed to be pleased Eric got him. I've no doubt if any other adult had gotten him Rachel would have had quite a chuckle.

I remember once Rachel and Eric and I were sitting around discussing "the collector mentality." She just couldn't believe adults were paying so much money for such odd and Ozzy things - like MGM-inspired plastic tea sets that were selling for hundreds of dollars. I started joking around that maybe she should cash in quick. Perhaps she could put her "Silver Slippers" in the auction? She looked confused and said, "But I've worn them!" I replied, "Oh, Rachel, you just don't understand - that's WHY they'd sell! Can't you just see Fred Meyer happily traveling home with his new shoes, once worn by an actual Royal Historian?" Rachel laughed - but for a millionth of a second I think she might have considered selling her shoes.

Anyway -  this is indeed the 400th blog post on Hungry Tiger Talk. On the whole I am enjoying myself and I hope the blog will continue for years to come. I started the blog to attract people to our on-line store and encourage the sale of our Oz books. It's not been terribly effective thus far. However, if you'd like to support the blog you can click here and go right to our store where you'll find a fine selection of Baum and Oz material, Eric Shanower's Oz comics, and much more. And to celebrate this 400th blog we are offering FREE Media Mail shipping for the next week. Simply enter the coupon code TIGERSHIP during checkout. The coupon is good thru next Thursday. Come buy a book!

Emerald City Radio - Michael Riley

David Maxine & Michael Riley at the 1998 WINKIE CON.

This week on Emerald City Radio roving reporter Number Nine conducts an in-depth interview with Oz and Baum scholar Michael O. Riley (author of Oz and Beyond and owner of the acclaimed Pamami Press). The twenty minute interview plays twice daily.

It's easy to listen to Emerald City Radio on Live365. Just click here to go to Live365 and click "Sign Up" in the upper right hand corner and join for free for access to thousands of internet radio stations. Then "Log In" and make a search for Emerald City Radio. When the Emerald City Radio logo shows up in your search results, just click on the logo to start listening right away! Listening is free.

So come on and give Emerald City Radio a try. Our current playlist is over 12 hours long with such a wide variety of Oz songs and music that you're sure to hear some old friends and some new delights.

Emerald City Radio - all great, all powerful - all the time! 

TIK-TOK Trash-Talk

Sal-u-ta-tions - I am Tik-Tok. I am ve-ry dis-ap-point-ed in the ter-ri-ble new ed-i-tion of my book pub-lished by the Brad-ford Ex-change.

It is an ug-ly, in-ac-cur-ate, and pre-pos-ter-ous mess. This book has put a cramp in my clock-work, so I will turn this post-ing ov-er to Da-vid, if you please.

Geez, Tik-Tok . . . making me do all the dirty work. Sigh, I'll begin with a few kind words first, if you don't mind.

I'd been all set to write a blog generally praising the Bradford edition of The Emerald City of Oz. For that book they generally did a very nice job (for the first time in their series). The printing of the line art is much better, the color plates are better, and for once there were no serious or even substantive problems to mention. It was certainly the nicest Emerald City published since the first edition.

The only minor quibble I take with the BE Emerald City is that they left the green metallic ink off of the front cover label - choosing to print it in a pea-soup green. It's not terrible - just inaccurate. On the whole it's a nice book.

Then Patchwork Girl arrived and it was back to mediocrity. The cloth color is a sickly and very wrong anti-freeze green. The printing of the color illustrations is better than in Ozma of Oz, but a number of pictures were completely recolored in Photoshop. This dampened my enthusiasm for writing any more blogs on these books.

But then, yesterday, Tik-Tok of Oz arrived. And it is so ghastly that a blog is in order. Many of the pages of text are so lightly printed they might as well have used pale gray ink. It's just heinous printing, with no oversight at the press whatsoever. Any decent printer should have thrown printing like this in the garbage. Below is a side by side example of a properly printed page from a first edition and a page of the gray BE version. You can hardly even read the page number on the BE version.

First edition at left - Bradford at right. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Worse than this crappy printing is the crappier reproduction. Compare the details in this image of Betsy Bobbin from page 59. Do I even need to explain how ridiculously terrible the BE version is? This quality of reproduction is typical throughout the book.

First edition at left - Bradford at right. CLICK TO ENLARGE

The color plate scans are not too bad, but they are too yellow. However, they are printed on hyper-gloss, hyper-white paper that feels and looks NOTHING like an Oz book. The stock is glossy on both sides, too, another inaccuracy.

The endpapers are adequate at best. They are far too gray and not in the least sharp. The stock feels wrong to me, too. One nice bonus is the inclusion of a reproduction of the 1920 Map of Oz with the Oz flag on the back. It is printed on the rough matte-finish endpaper stock - not the original glossy stock it should be. But as this is a "bonus" item, who's to quibble? Personally I wish they'd saved the bonus map to include with Glinda of Oz as the original map was back in 1920. It could have been a little something to spruce up the latter half of the BE books. Tik-Tok is the last book with any special features (the map endpapers), so from here on out, all the books are essentially the same: pictorial label, black and white endpapers, twelve color plates.

The cover (above) is generally attractive  -  but BE has recolored the orange/pink background in Photoshop and it feels a bit "faked." The blue outlining of the title lettering is far too light - indeed the whole cover is missing a blue cast the original has. Tik-Tok himself seems gray rather than bluish oxidized copper.

Now, IMHO, all these things are typical Bradford screw-ups. What got me Ozzed up enough to bother with another Bradford blog was this: They left out the ownership leaf! Completely! Interestingly, there is a blank page at the end of the Bradford Tik-Tok (there is none in the original edition), but of course they have an extra page at the end - they left out the ownership leaf at the beginning!

The page Bradford forgot to include!

It seems pretty clear no one is checking these books, asking for proofs, comparing them to original source material, or much of anything other than knocking out expensive product for a series that more and more people seem to be abandoning. These latter Baum books BE is producing might just turn out to be very rare and thus valuable someday, if only because no one will even be subscribing to the series by the time they get to Glinda.

What can one say? How do they forget the ownership leaf? How do they not question the mysterious appearance of an extra blank page at the end of the book? Why does no one care that the book is printed so abysmally?

I really don't plan to do anymore Bradford Exchange reviews - there's just no point. Hey, Tik-Tok, your thinking is wound up pretty tight, isn't there some advice or a moral you could offer?

In-deed, Da-vid. Fool me eight times shame on you - fool me four-teen times shame on me.

Oh, Tik-Tok . . .

_________________________________________________

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Ruby Slipper Adventure

Last Tuesday I set out on an unexpected journey to Los Angeles to see the Ruby Slippers for the first time. This wasn't just any pair of Ruby Slippers - these were the "Witch's Shoes," the best preserved pair, the pair used in close-ups, the pair worn by the dead Wicked Witch of the East, and the pair worn by Dorothy when she clicks her heels three times to go home.

I arrived at the Solange Azagury-Partidge jewelry gallery on Rodeo Drive. I spotted the slippers in a four-sided glass case at the back of the small gallery and approached them, these magical icons of Hollywood and Oz, and, well, they were just shoes.

I sensed no magic, my heart didn't race, they were just shoes. I felt an Ozzy exhilaration when I met Margaret Hamilton. I felt excited the first time I got to see the rotting remains of a flying monkey miniature from the film. But why nothing special for the shoes? Maybe I'm just not into feet. Or perhaps the idea of the Ruby Slippers is just so magical that the real thing can't help but disappoint with the loose sequins, the splitting seams, scratches on the orange paint on the bottoms. These aren't magical shoes - they didn't go to Oz. They're a half pound of leather, cloth, and cardboard, a pocket full of glass geegaws, and they're gonna sell for over two million dollars in a few weeks.

They also looked really old and not nearly as pristine as legend would report. I wondered if there was a protective layer of cloth or plastic over the sequins, as they looked so faded and gray. There wasn't. But they sure looked like they needed a good dusting!

Interestingly, the shoes have come out much redder in my photographs than they looked in person. And, of course, they were designed to be photographed, not to be studied with a magnifying glass. Who am I to complain of sloppy sequin work on the heels when the shoes were never meant to be seen up close from the back? And when I got home and looked at my photographs, I started to feel some rush of magic - the shoes sparkle and the color deepens, they start to work their enchantment.

I really had a wonderful time and I can think of no better way to see the slippers. The gallery set up a very attractive display so the shoes could be viewed from any angle. The store was empty the entire time I was there, so I could look and study and take pictures to my heart's content. The store itself with its bright red interior, carpeted in a rainbow of stars, couldn't have provided a more lovely setting.

When the staff saw how interested I was they started talking to me. They couldn't believe I'd driven up from San Diego only to see the shoes. The publicist came out and talked with me for a while. They brought me a Coke and a chilled glass, and we chatted a bit more. The gallery even took a few additional photos for me with their good digital camera (mine in this blog were taken with my iPhone). As I was leaving, the store offered me a few parting gifts - a handsome hardcover gallery catalog and a 2012 Solange datebook.

It was a magical afternoon!

Bradford Exchange - Hit the ROAD, Jack!

I must say that I had some hope that the Bradford Exchange facsimile Road to Oz would be a lovely and pleasant surprise. It's not. It is probably their worst effort so far. The two-color pages in Ozma of Oz were uglier, but some of Ozma was pretty - especially the cover. In the Bradford Road to Oz nothing is pretty, nothing attractive, nothing well done.

In the previous BE releases I could at least praise the cover stamping. On Road they've missed the sandboat. The artwork is reduced in size so that it doesn't fill the full cover area, the spine is very crudely redrawn and reduced even more, and the color of the cloth and the stamping inks is way off.

1st Edition at Left - Bradford at right. CLICK TO ENLARGE

The cloth is a horrid anti-freeze green (the scan above doesn't do it justice!), nothing whatsoever like the original. The light butterscotch brown used in the donkey-headed Shaggy Man has been replaced with a bright sunshine yellow. The copy we received is badly off-register, too. Not only are the colors not well aligned, but the printed inks don't match up with the blind-stamping. (BTW, I am not at all convinced the Oz books ever had any blind-stamping. I think this is probably just a Bradford technique for faking quality cloth-stamping.)

There are some serious printing errors in the text as well. The images of the text and running title are almost all way too high on the page and they are not uniform with one another. In the example below, look how high the text sits on the right-hand page.

There is nothing like this in any of the three first-state copies I have access to as I write this. In all of them the running titles are uniform in height and the text is positioned in the center of the page. One minor quibble, the BE version is much thicker than the three first-states here in the Tiger Den. Perhaps BE couldn't match the paper for both color and thickness? They also chose to leave the edges of the book un-tinted. Personally, I think the blue page-edging is much more attractive than just seeing the rainbow paper. The blue-edging makes the rainbow paper a surprise!

The reproduction in the BE edition is truly horrid. How bad is it? It's so poor I can't find anything to compare it favorably to. Books of Wonder is far better, the 1970s "white edition" is far better. Shockingly, the Del Rey mass market paperback has better reproduction of some illustrations.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

The BE illustrations are all muddy and lacking in detail. And for some reason the ink is gray, not black, which only makes the illustrations even harder to see on the colored paper stock. They are just visually dead. I can not stress enough how terrible the BE reproduction is. Below is a good example from the endpapers - one of Neill's greatest Oz drawings ever. This example features a section of the endpapers showing BE on the left, a 1st state at center, and the 1970s "white edition" at right. This quality of reproduction is pretty typical throughout the BE facsimile.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Before anyone starts saying, "Oh, but the original is so hard to reproduce; it's printed on that colored paper!" all I can say is "Balderdash!" I have worked with these illustrations quite a bit and it's not hard to reproduce them adequately. In the example below you can see a scan I just made from the 2009 Winkie Con program book. To create it, I scanned my first state copy of Road, generated a PDF, had it printed by a Print-on-Demand printer in the Winkie program book, and then rescanned it tonight from the program book as my blog example. Why is my quick and dirty scan on the left, printed by a POD printer, better and more detailed than BE's crappy facsimile on the right?

CLICK TO ENLARGE

The Road to Oz is generally considered John R. Neill's finest Oz illustration work. Many consider Road the most beautiful Oz book. This should have been the easiest facsimile for BE to pull off. There are no color plates, no arcane printing needs like Wonderful Wizard requires. Yet BE has given us a uniformly ugly book, with gray, blobby illustrations throughout. The book is corrupted with mis-positioned pages and off-register cover stamping. When this printing rolled off the press someone at BE should have taken a look, demanded a do-over, and pulped this entire printing. When some of the illustrations in a $60 facsimile can be bested in reproduction by a Del Rey mass market paperback printed on newsprint, something is seriously wrong.

Don't cha come back no more, no more . . .

Dickin' Around

Dick Martin circa 1980

No doubt you are all familiar with the work of Oz illustrator Dick Martin. He was the last "official" illustrator for the Reilly and Lee Oz books and created the pictures for The Visitors from Oz (1960) and Merry Go Round in Oz (1963.) He also illustrated picture-book abridgements of the first four Oz books and he designed the ever popular "white editions" of the Oz series that dominated bookshelves in the 1960s and '70s.

Dick also played a huge part in the early days of the International Wizard of Oz Club, doing research, editing and laying out The Baum Bugle, working on bibliography, and much else including illustrating Ruth Plumly Thompson's final two Oz books, illustrating the McGraws' Forbidden Fountain of Oz (1980), and finally writing an Oz book of his own, The Ozmapolitan of Oz (1986). And at the time of his death in 1990 he had the finest Baum and Oz collection in the world.

Dick was a very private man, very reserved and quiet (he was very hard-of-hearing), and he hated fandom of any kind, despite being a fanatical Oz collector, comic collector, and toy collector himself. I am sure, too, that some of Dick Martin's reserve was because he was gay (but pretty firmly in the closet). It wasn't exactly a secret (at least to other gay people). I suspected Dick was gay the first time I got a letter from him. His tone, his quirky sense of humor, his ultra-dapper author's photo in The Oz Scrapbook (1978) all set my Gaydar off, even though I was a sixteen-year-old closeted gay boy myself.

I'll share more Dick Martin stories in the future, but in today's blog I'm gonna discuss Dick's mischievous side. Dick's illustrations were fairly cartoony, always light-hearted and fun. But he also liked to work in quaint references, little in-jokes for his friends. Sometimes these were Baum or Oz collecting references, sometimes bits of sly innuendo like in this charming illustration from Merry Go Round in Oz showing two cute little boys holding hands in the Land of Good Children. In Oz it seems everyone is a Friend of Dorothy.

Two Ozzy boys holding hands in MERRY GO ROUND IN OZ

Or in the illustration of Prince Gules below. Note the placement of the big Easter egg and Gules's excitement at finding that big ring. And if it's not obvious enough what's going on, Gules's right hand signals it quite blatantly.

 
This "after dark" in Oz streak is most evident in a short bit of Oz fiction Dick wrote for friends in the mid-1960s called Oz ad Nauseum. It was later printed in a fanzine called No, no.10 (June 1972), edited by charter Oz Club member Ruth Berman, and it was included as a premium broadsheet in our own Oz-story No. 6 (2000).

But for your reading pleasure it is also available as this month's free on-line Tiger Tale. I'm sure you'll get a kick out of this very irreverent Oz tale, and you'll get to spend a few minutes with a more private Dick Martin than you get to know from only his illustrations. Go read it!