Map of Oz Monday - Origins of the Oz Club Maps

If any Oz maps can come close to challenging Baum's own maps of 1914 it is the highly detailed set produced by the International Wizard of Oz Club. We will spend the next several weeks discussing these maps' evolution, and their many pros and cons.

But I think a look at some of the origins of the Oz Club maps might be in order before we begin our in-depth analysis. The Oz Club maps were researched and designed by James E. Haff and drawn by Oz illustrator Dick Martin.

James E. Haff (left) and Dick Martin (right) creators of the Oz Club's maps.

The Oz Club's maps were first published in 1962. Jim Haff certainly had an affinity for this sort of meticulous note-taking and puzzle solving; indeed he was a civilian cartographer for the U. S. Air Force. But the Oz Club's map project was begun by Robert R. Pattrick, who was already making notes and preliminary Oz maps when he died in August 1960 at the age of thirty-three. The Oz Club, and especially club secretary Fred M. Meyer, did all they could to honor Pattrick's legacy, and the "Explanatory Notes" for the Club's map set pays homage to Pattrick's preliminary efforts, stating: 

The International Wizard of Oz Club is especially indebted to the late Robert R. Pattrick, whose enthusiastic and scholarly studies on Oz geography blazed the trail for the maps and were of immeasurable aid in their compilation.

One of Robert R. Pattrick's Oz maps - Click to enlarge.

Above you can see the only Pattrick map I know of that still survives. You will note that he has flipped Oz so that the Munchkins are on the right hand side of Oz and in the east. While there is no compass rose, Pattrick regarded Baum's 1914 compass as an aberration. Oddly, Pattrick did not flip the rest of the continent, thus it still generally matches the 1914 "Surrounding Countries" map. I believe he did this mainly to keep the map consistent with the text of Ozma of Oz where the Land of Ev is supposed to be across the desert from the Munchkin Country. Correcting for this minor textual inconsistency plays havoc with many of the later Oz books, but that seems to be what he did. I am unsure why Pattrick, the supposed Oz and Baum scholar, failed to make Hiland and Loland into an island and has made Regos and Coregos much smaller than Pingaree, when in the book Rinkitink in Oz it is quite clear they are much larger islands.

A few other things to note in Pattrick's map: he has added Thompson's Corumbia, Corabia, and Samandra to the northern Winkie country. Their shape and placement is nearly identical on the Oz Club map but Corabia and Samandra have switched places. Pattrick has also added Pumperdink, Mudge and Ragbad to the map. As we'll see when we get to the Oz Club's map of "Surrounding Countries," Menankypoo will be where Pattrick placed it, yet yet Jim Haff will have chosen to move Rash to the north

Several choices made by Pattrick were preserved in the Oz Club's maps, most obviously the combining of the Land of Ev and the Nome King's Dominion. Note the cute sign pointing the way to Ozamaland. Dick Martin and Jim Haff used that same solution for dealing with the very distant location (and indeed Pattrick's same little sign buoy!) on the club's "Map of the Countries Surrounding Oz".

One other aspect of Pattrick's map to take note of is that he has drawn the entire continent of Nonestica, though it is a bit uninspired, essentially just a modification of the original 1914 rectangular map (see his map above).

Now, there is one map that I still need to share with you as a progenitor of the Oz Club maps. This is the map drawn by Dick Martin for The Visitors from Oz (1960).

Dick Martin's Map of the Land of Oz from THE VISITORS FROM OZ.

While this map is only part of an illustration, it holds many interesting details. First it is clearly a modified photostat of the1914 Baum map; the lettering matches the original map exactly. But Martin has also provided a coastline for Nonestica and a much more interesting one than Pattrick had drawn. I especially like the long peninsula jutting out from Merryland (click the map above to see it more clearly). For me, details like that spark the imagination! There is no good textual reason to add it (no such peninsula or harbor is referenced in Baum's Dot and Tot of Merryland), but it adds detail; and detail makes for reality. And to me, believing in the map is critical to me if said map is purporting to be the real Land of Oz. One oddity in the map is that Martin has moved Pyramid Mountain to the land of the Mifkets, just south of the Quadling Country. I suspect Martin simply moved an existing detail (here obscured by the Scarecrow's hat) to a more visible location to add detail to the map.

More interestingly, Martin is the first person to have added Baum's Isle of Yew (from the 1903 The Enchanted Island of Yew) to the Ozziverse (see map above), though it is shown here in a different location (south of the Forest of Burzee) than it will be on the Oz Club map. But note, too, that Martin has also added some unidentified islands both off the coast of Merryland, and also in the vicinity of Pingaree. There is another detail I had not spotted until I enlarged this section of the map below, which is that Martin has indicated the mainland extends out to the east at the southern border of Rinkitink (see below).

Detail showing several unnamed islands added by Martin.

When I joined the Oz Club in March 1977, the first thing I ordered was a set of the Oz Club's maps. My parents were in the midst of separating; and I was burying my anxiety in Oz research and Oz collecting. A year or so earlier I had begun a large four-foot-wide topographical Oz map with lichen trees and salt-dough mountains. Mapping the fairyland I was taking refuge in made it seem all the more real I suppose. Below you can see young me with my Oz Map birthday cake!

Me with my Map of Oz birthday cake a few months after I got my first set of Oz maps.

Oh, what a photograph! I had also begun requesting sale-lists via SASE from the Club's "Oz Trading Post," and as the Ozzy fates would have it, the first two things I bought were purchased from Oz Club map designer James E. Haff: a copy of Magical Mimics in Oz and a copy of the 1920 Reilly & Lee Map of Oz. I was very excited to see and own a "real" and "old" Oz map! The club's map set didn't arrive until after my mom, sister, and I had moved out of my childhood home at the end of April.

I must admit I loved the Oz Club's maps. They went up on my wall and stayed there pretty much throughout my teen years. One aspect of the maps that Oz fans today might not take into account is that the maps also functioned as a window into the post-Baum Oz series. Back then all of the post-Baum Oz titles were out of print and difficult to find. I had never yet read any of the post-Baum Oz books when the maps arrived and I remember spending lots of time trying to imagine what book each odd location might be from, and then, following along on the maps as I eventually read each of the later twenty-six Oz books.

Next week we will begin our detailed look at the Oz Club's "Map of the Marvelous Land of Oz" as originally released in 1962. So pack your rucksack, a canteen of Ozade, and make sure you have your compass, I'm sure it will come in handy at pointing us in the right direction!

Take me to the next Map of Oz Monday blog!

You may also go back to the beginning of this multi-part series by clicking here.

Map of Oz Monday - Under Baum's Directions

Next week we will begin our discussion of the Oz Club's set of maps. But before we start on that part of our journey I wanted to revisit, and I hope strengthen, one of my views on the geography and orientation of the Land of Oz: there is no mistake in directions on Baum's original 1914 map of Oz. He fully intended that Oz have a backwards compass, with east on the left and west on the right.

Baum's 1914 Map of Oz with non-standard compass points.

I am not the only Oz fan to prefer Baum's quirky directional sense. Bill Campbell on The Oz Enthusiast blog said of Baum's 1914 map:  "This is unlike any standard map, but Oz is a magical land - perhaps that is simply how things work there! . . . I still like the original map in Tik-Tok with its unique directions - that's how I think the map should be!"

Oz fans long surmised that Baum probably had a hand in drawing the 1914 map and sent it in to the publisher where it was redrawn by a staff artist. Yet there was never any proof that Baum had a hand in the creation of the 1914 map. But a couple years ago I found verification when I was given access to the papers of Louis F. Gottschalk, composer of the 1913 musical The Tik-Tok Man of Oz and of the scores to the 1914 Oz Films.

Gottschalk and Baum circa 1913 - Collection of David Maxine.

In 1925 Louis F. Gottschalk wrote his memories of watching L. Frank Baum draw the Oz map that was included as the endpapers of Tik-Tok of Oz (1914). Here's Gottschalk's recollection:

I remember when we were at work on the Tik-Tok Man of Oz, Frank took a day off to answer at least 100 letters that had accumulated during the previous week. One little girl wrote and asked him for a map of the land of Oz saying she wished to follow them in their travels. In my presence he made a map of the mythical country of Oz and in the next Oz book the map appeared. “I do so love the map of Oz” wrote the little girl, “for now I can follow the Scarecrow, Tin-Woodman, and Tik-Tok and Betsy and Pumpkin head when the cyclone picks them up here and drops them down there in another country.”

Gottschalk's full-length memorial to Baum, which includes this passage, was published for the first time in the Winkie Con 50 Souvenir Program which is available here: Order a copy of the Winkie Con 50 Souvenir book.

So we have confirmation that Baum designed the 1914 map of the Land of Oz. To me, knowing that Baum was responsible makes this map the most authentic of all Oz maps. That, of course, does not address why the map has east on the left and west on the right. But it is too deliberate and if it was a mistake, it was too easily fixed. As I said in this previous post:

Neither Baum, nor his wife, nor the artist who redrew it, nor John R. Neill, nor the publisher ever said, "Hey LFB, you got your compass points wrong!" If Baum had some moment of directional dyslexia when he drew the rough map, there are just too many eyes and too many steps, from his sketchy doodles to finished drawing, to making proofs, to printing the book, for this not to have been EASILY corrected. If it wasn't corrected - it wasn't an error - thus, this is how Baum viewed Oz.

Two years after the map was first published we get confirmation from Baum himself that this is how he viewed Oz and that it wasn't simply a typesetting or artistic error. On September 6, 1916, Baum submitted another map along with the manuscript of The Lost Princess of Oz to the publisher and in the accompanying cover letter he stated:

You will find a "Map of the Search for the Lost Princess," which I would like to have redrawn and printed in black-and-white and placed in the fore part of the book. Nothing we ever did made such a hit with the kiddies as the maps of Oz we once used for endpapers, and I think this present map worthwhile on that account.

So Baum confirms that he drew this map (admittedly to be neatened up by a staff artist), but it preserves the Winkie Country "on the right and in the West" orientation and other geographical details of the 1914 map. Baum has even labeled the branches of the Winkie River, which as you'll read below, becomes very important.

Map of Oz from THE LOST PRINCESS OF OZ (1917).

In the text of Lost Princess Baum writes the following:

At the east [border of the Winkie Country] which part lies nearest the Emerald City, there are beautiful farmhouses and roads, but as you travel west, you first come to a branch of the Winkie River, beyond which there is a rough country where few people live, and some of these are quite unknown to the rest of the world. After passing through this rude section of territory, which no one ever visits, you would come to still another branch of the Winkie River, after crossing which you would find another well-settled part of the Winkie Country extending westward quite to the Deadly Desert . . .

And a little later he writes:

In the course of a few hours, however, they had left the tilled fields [around the Emerald City] and entered the country of the Winkies. . . . Long before night the travellers had crossed the Winkie River near to the Scarecrow's tower (which was now vacant) and had entered the rolling prairie where few people live.

Here we have Baum himself using this map in his written text and describing the travelers leaving the Emerald City, moving left to right on the map, and getting to the "East Branch" of the Winkie River before they get to the "West Branch." A careful reading of the text makes it clear that Baum intended the text to reflect the map - including the reversed compass directions.

It seems very clear that this is simply how Baum saw the Land of Oz. Why he never made more of it I can't imagine. Perhaps he just thought it was quaint or magical. At one time I would have suggested that Baum was bad at directions and simply drew the map with the Winkies and Munchkins reversed. And then, rather than start over, he chuckled and fixed it by labeling the compass to suit his drawing. Perhaps that was how it happened. But it must have become a very deliberate choice, as it could have been fixed at any point in the book's production process at Reilly and Britton. So I'm left with the firm belief that this map shows Oz how it was meant to be.

But I am curious what Baum's hand-drawn map of Oz would have looked like. How detailed was it? Was it a scribble or quite precise? Baum's original map does not seem to survive. But I think I can show you a similar map that I believe was in fact drawn by Baum himself.

This is the map included in Baum's Boy Fortune Hunters in Panama (1908) which has been reprinted by Hungry Tiger Press as Sam Steele's Adventures: the Amazing Bubble Car. If you're interested you can order a copy below! In that book's text the map is found in the diary of  the recently murdered Maurice Kleppisch. The map was almost certainly drawn by Baum himself and submitted with his manuscript to Reilly & Britton. We know Baum was artistic and a good craftsman, and I find it impossible to believe that the publisher had a staff artist draw this map for an inconsequential boys series book. This is simply Baum having fun. And since the map didn't need to be as "polished" as the Oz map would need to be, Baum's pen-and-ink skill were totally adequate. Here's that map.

Baum's map from THE BOY FORTUNE HUNTERS IN PANAMA (1908).

I think you can see there are many similarities to the 1914 Map of the Land of Oz. The way rivers are drawn, forests delineated by little little "x" marks, the "hash mark" mountains, and indeed even the lettering of the oceans which runs top to bottom in differing directions for each ocean - exactly like the labeling of the Deadly Desert on the 1914 map.

Granted, how many ways are there to draw a map? But if Baum drew as detailed and finished Oz maps as he seemingly drew for The Boy Fortune Hunters in Panama, then I think we can say Baum himself is responsible for the detail in the Oz maps, whether the undulations of rivers or the placement of the Winkie and Munchkin countries.

Next Monday we will begin our discussion of the Oz Club's Maps of Oz.
Click here to go to our next installment of Map of Oz Monday!

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Map of Oz Monday - The 1914 Map of Oz

Last week we looked at the earliest Map of the Land of Oz. Today we explore the first detailed map of the Land of Oz, and to my mind, the most important - the map included as the front endpaper of the first edition of Tik-Tok of Oz in 1914.

1914 Map of the Land of Oz - CLICK TO ENLARGE

I have no doubt L. Frank Baum drew and designed this map (though publisher Reilly & Britton probably had a staff artist prepare the final inked drawing). Indeed, Baum's involvement in the creation of this map is what to me gives it such authenticity. L. Frank Baum decided on the shapes of the countries, their borders, mountains and rivers, etc.

One can truly see Baum's mind at work in many of the choices he made - especially in the fact that he added locations to the map that he had not yet written about, such as Mount Munch, Jinxland, the Yips, Skeezers, as well as a vast forest in the Gillikin Country and a large lake just outside the Emerald City. Baum eventually used the forest in The Magic of Oz when we learned it was the Forest of Gugu but he never made use of the lake.

Before I go any further in my analysis of the Tik-Tok maps, I guess I had better address the most controversial aspect of this map - that east and west are reversed in the Land of Oz. Again, I have no doubt this is L. Frank Baum's intention. Mainly because no other explanation makes sense. In the Oz books Baum always has the Munchkins in the east and the Winkies in the west with no exceptions.

There have been many half-baked notions on how Baum might have made such a supposedly grievous error. One of the silliest is that he based his map on the glass Magic-Lantern slide of the "Fairylogue map," and that Baum simply viewed the slide from the wrong side. Could you look at the glass slide below and not realize it was backward?

Perhaps Baum just confused his east and west directions? Uh huh ... and neither Baum, nor his wife, or the artist who redrew it, or John R. Neill, or the publisher ever said, "Hey LFB, you got your compass points wrong!" If Baum had some moment of directional dyslexia when he drew the rough map, there are just too many eyes and too many steps, from his sketchy doodles to finished drawing, to making proofs, to printing the book, for this not to have been EASILY corrected. If it wasn't corrected - it wasn't an error - thus, this is how Baum viewed Oz.

This seemingly wonky choice of Baum's may well have rankled Reilly & Britton because soon after Baum's death the publisher reissued the map with a "corrected" traditional compass and THAT caused a whole fairyland of trouble! But I'll save that discussion for a future blog post!

We will never know why Baum flipped east and west. Perhaps he planned to tell a tale about it he never got around to. My favorite theory in an "Oz as a real place" frame of mind is that the east/west flip has to do with how Glinda created the Barrier of Invisibility at the end of The Emerald City of Oz. After all, on the 1908 map the eastern Munchkins are seen on the right and the western Winkies are seen on the left - just like our directions. So this "Barrier of Invisibility" idea explains and validates both maps. In 1908 directions were normal, after 1910 they were flipped. This rationalization even solves the seeming error at the end of Ozma of Oz when the rescue party returns home from the Land of Ev and visits with the King of the Munchkins. In 1907 Ev was indeed across the desert from the Munchkin Country. After 1910 it was not. Is everybody still with me?

There are certainly a few problems with this mirror-flip Barrier of Invisibility theory. For one, the path of the sand boat doesn't work. And in the Map of Surrounding Countries (which we will discuss next week) the compass directions match those of Oz. Did Glinda flip directions for the entire continent?

There are a few small errors on this 1914 Oz map. The Truth Pond looks rather like the Truth Lake and the Yellow Brick Road is shown as being totally straight. It's certainly possible, but I think few people imagine it as such. It's interesting to note that Baum has it extend out of Oz and on into the Desert. It could be Baum failed to erase guidelines and the cartographer simply inked it all in? Or perhaps there was to be a story about this someday.

I've given some more thought to the fact that the Fairylogue map is square. Last week I suggested Baum had drawn Oz to be a square-shaped. I don't think so anymore - the map is too stylized. I think the Fairylogue Map is simply showing a smaller portion of Oz and the map simply doesn't extend to show the actual and perhaps then unknown borders. The Fairylogue Map's double-ruled delineation of the deadly desert does not show the actual border either, but only indicates that an unknown desert barrier surrounds all of Oz.

Overlay of 1908 map on top of 1914 map.

Perhaps the Fairylogue Map is simply an old and not very accurate map from the days before Ozma came to power, the poor quality of said map being what prompted Ozma to commission a new set of maps to be made by Professor Wogglebug (who researched and drew the Tik-Tok maps according to the map legend). It's interesting to note that overlaying the two maps like this almost exactly creates that weird little triangular bite out of the north-western Gillikin Country. Perhaps Baum did use the 1908 map as a starting point! That said, I still think the only clear reason for the east/west reversal can be a deliberate choice on his part. Might Ozma have more clearly delineated and expanded the green area around the Emerald City? It's not shown at all on the 1908 map yet seems almost a country in itself on the 1914 one.

Lastly, I was surprised to see that the 1914 Map of the Land of Oz has never been reprinted anywhere except for the Books of Wonder and Bradford Exchange reprints of Tik-Tok of Oz. The first edition of The Annotated Wizard of Oz claims to have reprinted them, but in fact used the "corrected" 1920 version. The first edition copy of Tik-Tok here in the Tiger Den was missing a portion of the upper right free endpaper. I replaced it from the Bradford Exchange reprint (notice the non-matching whiteness of the desert area). I've complained about mediocre reproduction in these Bradford Exchange books before and, alas, I have still another fresh complaint! Bradford has distorted the map endpapers - I had to squash and stretch that little corner to make it fit, so don't count on the BE Tik-Tok maps for accuracy - they've been reproduced somewhat warped.

Next week we will take a look at the map of Countries Surrounding the Land of Oz. (Click here for the next Oz Map blog post.)

Map of Oz Monday - the 1920 Map

Last week we explored the Lost Princess of Oz map of 1916 and that brings us to the trouble-maker! This is, of course, the 1920 map printed by the publisher Reilly & Lee and given away with Oz books for the next year or so.

The 1920 Map of the Land of Oz given away by the publishers.

With one huge exception this is the map printed in Tik-Tok of Oz in 1914 - the exception of course is the "correction" of the compass directions to match our "real-world" compass with east on the right and west on the left. On the last three maps we've discussed (all designed by L. Frank Baum) east and west were flipped - the eastern Munchkins on the left hand side of the map and the western Winkies on the right.

I very strongly believe that Baum liked the wonky directions (no idea why!). He created three maps with this "mistake" and had multiple opportunities to correct them, had he wanted to. Oz retained its Baumian directional compass until Baum died in 1919, and then suddenly ZAP! the publisher pulled a switcheroo and reprinted the map as a give-away and they flipped the compass back to normal and the trouble began!

The trouble being that in 1920 Reilly & Lee hired Ruth Plumly Thompson to continue writing the Oz books and they sent her copies of this map. She then proceeded to describe a Land of Oz with the Munchkins in the west and the Winkies in the east!  I certainly don't blame her - the publisher had just hired her to write new Oz books and sent her the "official" map of Oz. A map that sadly no longer reflected Baum's view of his fairyland - so half the Oz series would come to say the Munchkins are in the east and half the series would say the Munchkins were in the west. Not much else to say. This map has caused people to blame Thompson for not paying enough attention to Baum and confused a whole generation of new Oz fans.

The map itself is very well printed on a nice coated paper. There must have been many copies printed and distributed as this map is not particularly rare. Indeed, it is the most common of all the Oz maps printed by Reilly & Lee! The black and white coloring-contest map seldom turns up, nor does the undersized Who's Who in Oz postcard map, and the 1968 Poster maps are rarer still.

One reason so many of these 1920 maps may survive is that, when folded, they fit perfectly inside an Oz book so children could keep them handy. The back of the map is said to show the Oz flag.

The Royal Flag of Oz

I agree it looks like a flag design, but I've never seen any Reilly & Lee publicity stating that it's the Oz flag. I wonder if there was any? I also wonder why the publisher didn't just print the map of surrounding countries on the back.

The Big Stretch

Reilly & Lee introduced one other mistake into this 1920 Oz map - they are using the same plates they used to print it in the 1914 copies of Tik-Tok of Oz. While they went to the trouble to "correct" the compass they did not get rid of the extra 3/8" space at the middle fold of the map. This space was added in 1914 to accommodate the crease at the hinge of the book. Look up at the top image of the map: The Gillikin mountains and lettering are separated by a blank area. There is a similar gap in the forest of the fighting trees in the Quadling Country. And the Emerald City appears as a widened horizontal jewel, not the circular emerald it should be. Here's how the map should appear without the extra 3/8" stretch:

Now, at first it might seem like the lettering and most of the line art are simply stopped in the gap - that the shapes of the actual countries are drawn "correctly." But looking at the 1914 Tik-Tok maps says differently. The book-hinge falls at a different geographical point in the Map of Oz than in the Surrounding Countries. The stretch in the Oz map is as described above - in the Surrounding Countries the stretch runs through the Winkie Country. Here's an image of a flattened out version of the Surrounding Countries map from Tik-Tok.

Notice how much wider the Winkie Country seems. Because of this added 3/8" the Emerald City is not even in the center of Oz anymore and here the city appears round like it should. These 1914 maps only show Oz correctly when they are viewed as endpapers and have that 3/8" space absorbed into the crease at the hinge. This was a really nice touch and showed a great deal of care and foresight in the design of the 1914 maps. Few people would have taken the trouble to adjust the images of two different maps so that they would each appear correctly when glued into the book.

That's about it for this week. I will add one bonus tale though. This copy of the 1920 map was one of the very first "antiquarian" Oz things I ever bought. I had just joined the Oz Club and the first person I contacted via the old Oz Trading Post was James E. Haff, who had offered a good sales list. I bought two things: the 1954 "Popular Edition" of Magical Mimics and this map. I had two months worth of allowance on hand - I was fourteen. So except for my childhood "white editions" this map is the Oz item I've had the longest.

See you next week for the 1921 Parker Brothers gameboard map.
(Click here for the next Oz Map blog post.)

Map of Oz Monday - Oz Club Map of Oz 1962

Oz Club's "Marvelous Land of Oz" map - 1962 version. Click to enlarge.

Today we'll begin looking in detail at the Oz Club's set of maps. We explored the origins of these maps last week, so let's jump right in! The club reissued and revised their Oz maps a number of times over the years. The first version (seen above) was published in 1962. There was a new set with many revisions and additions published in 1967 and additional editions published in 1971, 1975, and 1980, and a full overhaul of the maps was carried out in 2008. You can tell the issue date of the main "Map of the Marvelous Land of Oz" in a given set by the roman numeral date in the yellow shield on the Tin Woodman decoration. Alas, the 2008 revision inadvertently retained the 1980 date.

This 1962 version is also the first map to include locations and geographical features from all of the then-39 Oz titles, from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) through The Hidden Valley of Oz (1951), as well as locales from the Little Wizard Stories of Oz (1913) and The Laughing Dragon of Oz (1936). The 1962 version of the "Explanatory Notes" that accompanies these maps fails to mention anything about what books are covered in the maps. Many of Baum's non-Oz works are referenced in the "Map of Surrounding Countries," but we will save that conversation for a later blog post.

I greatly admire these maps and the care James E. Haff put into them. Haff was a civilian cartographer for the U. S. Air Force and a consummate Oz aficionado. And lest there be any doubt, the actual design of the maps is the work of Jim Haff. Dick Martin's role was to prepare a clean inked version of the line art, lettering, etc. and then to prepare the color separations, which were done by hand.

Below you can see Jim Haff's working drawing for this map. You'll probably want to click on the image so you can see the level of detail better.

James E. Haff's working copy of the 1962 "Land of Oz" map. Click to enlarge.

Thankfully, the first thing to point out is that Haff restored Baum's Munchkins in the east, Winkies in the west orientation for the first time since 1920.  But this map has for the first time in any Oz map, made both those countries and those directions agree with our "real world" compass. From the notes I've read, it doesn't seem like the creators of the Oz Club map ever even considered that Baum's 1914 map might have been "correct."  I can understand if they made a different choice, but it is surprising to me that the idea that directions were in fact reversed in Oz was not an option that seems to have occurred to them.

Jim Haff took great pride in spots where he could "sync up" details from different Oz books. A prime example being his charting of the Winkie River. Haff wrote in his unpublished notes: "This results incidentally, in a rather neat coincidence: Suds and its adjacent lake and are an extension of the Dangerous Passage and Soap Slide on the Winkie River."

Suds, of course, is from Ruth Plumly Thompson's The Gnome King of Oz (1927) and the Dangerous Passage and Soap Slide are from John R. Neill's Lucky Bucky in Oz (1942). It is little touches like this that make the maps so much fun!

There are many details unique to the 1962 version of this map; things that will be adjusted and corrected in the 1967 and later editions. To point out only a few: Reera is north of Skeezer Lake in this map and she will eventually be moved south of Skeezer Lake; Torpedo Town, Stairway, and the Delves are further north in the 1962 map and will be shifted further south in later maps. Note, too, that this map came out the year before Merry Go Round in Oz was published, so none of the locations from that book are on the 1962 version of the map.

While Dick Martin has for the most part drawn in each locale exactly where Haff placed it, there were a few omissions, such as Martin's failing to draw in "Bottle Hill." The label is present on the '62 map but the actual hill is not (see full-color map above). I will more systematically itemize the changes made to later versions of the maps as we get to those discussions.

Central section of Haff's master Map of Oz. Click to enlarge.

For the most part the published maps strictly adhere to Haff's master map. But the Munchkin Country was radically altered before the map went to press in 1962. This is largely due to a disagreement over exactly where Unc Nunkie and Ojo's cottage is located. Personally, I think Haff's original choice to keep Ojo and Doctor Pipt in the southern Munchkin Country was correct. Whoever urged their shift to the north created an unfortunate blemish. I was going to address this messy business in today's blog, but when I sat down with the various maps and copies of The Patchwork Girl of Oz and Ojo in Oz, I found the issue complex enough to warrant an entire post. Guess what you'll be reading next week?

There is another unique feature of the 1962 version of the maps. Dick Martin did not use a black plate in his color separation. He seems to have used a deep royal blue instead of black (see below); the three other colors being process yellow, magenta, and cyan. It's a handsome choice, IMHO. According to David Greene, Dick Martin personally oversaw the printing of the maps in Chicago.

Note that the text is printed in royal blue in the 1962 version of the map.

Despite my admiration and fondness for the Haff/Martin maps they have a major weakness (for me anyway) in that they generally disregard the shapes of the countries as presented in Baum's 1914 Map of Oz. The Gillikin Country is much enlarged, the area of the Emerald City is greatly shrunk, a good deal of real estate is taken away from the Quadling Country, and the proportion of Oz is altered, making it somewhat more square than Baum's fairyland.

I prepared a little animation to show the transformation from Baum's map to the Oz Club map. I had to mirror-image the Oz Club map to make the two maps "morph." I have aligned the top northern borders of both maps, as that edge was the least changed. I think you can see how radically Haff and Martin altered Ozian geography.

I suspect Haff adjusted that bit of the yellow Winkie Country to creep down to the southern edge of Oz so that the route of the sand boat would end in the Winkie Country as is described in The Road to Oz, but  there seems little reason for Haff to have altered the shapes of the other countries. Personally, I would have just redrawn the path of the sand boat into an arc, or shifted Dunkiton and Foxville, rather than alter the shapes Baum gave to his Oz countries.

I asked Jim Haff about some of this back in the late 1970's and he replied that he just wanted to equalize the land masses of each country a bit and that he always thought the area around the Emerald City seemed too large. There is also a possibility that Haff and Martin wanted to make the map "different" from the Reilly & Lee maps so as to avoid any hint of copyright infringement. But both Jim and Dick had died before I thought of asking them about that possible reason. In any case the altered country shapes make the map less authentic to me.

It would be hard to deny the influence the Oz Club's maps have had. They have been available from the club for over fifty years, they have been reproduced in various fantasy works, and they were included in all of the Del Rey reprints of the Oz books.

Next week we'll explore exactly what they did to the Munchkin Country and check out a few missed opportunities as well. Click here for the next blog in this series.

Original ad for the Oz Club Maps in THE BAUM BUGLE, Christmas 1963.

I must express my gratitude to Cindy Ragni of Wonderful Books of Oz.com for her help and generosity in sharing scans of Jim Haff's original "research" maps and many other helpful materials she has directed my way.

Map of Oz Monday - Minor Map Mop-Up

We are quickly running out of maps in the main series of forty Oz books. Today we'll look at a couple of the remaining few. First we come to the "Diagram of a Journey" in Neill's Lucky Bucky in Oz (1942). As described in the illustration it is clearly "not a true map," yet it does have a couple interesting features, besides being a handsome image.

LUCKY BUCKY Map - Click to enlarge.

The geographic detail in this image, such as the Zeron's Mountain, Dollfins, etc., could easily be incorporated into a "true" map. There is a lot of detail in the mountain range as depicted. But one thing I found especially interesting is that Neill gives us a view of Ozma's palace from the south. You might remember we discussed the northerly view in a previous blog post. Here Neill has definitely drawn a different view of the palace without the grand entrance or the pair of high towers in the wall. Is Neill consciously drawing it differently, as he has clearly shown he beleives the main entrance to the palace is on the north side?

Note that we see Ozma's Palace, surrounded by its high wall, but surrounding it are many small Oz-style cottages with their domed roofs and "stick 'em up!" chimneys, shown both to the north and south of the palace. Neill does not show any outer city wall. Does this suggest that Neill may have considered the entire green area on most traditional Oz maps to be "the city" and that only the palace is behind the wall? This might explain why he seems to never show the outer wall in his later Oz book illustrations. Essentially he is giving us the walled Palace and grounds surrounded by Emerald City suburbs of traditional Oz-style homes. Then again, this isn't a "true map."

The next map in the Reilly & Lee Oz series comes to us as the endpapers of Jack Snow's Who's Who in Oz (1954).

1954 Map of Oz - Click to enlarge.

Since it is hard to see the complete image when it is used as endpapers I have reproduced the above from a postcard-size version of the same map that was probably prepared by the publisher for Snow to send to his various Oz fan correspondents.

There is not much new to say about this map. The most interesting thing is that it combines the two 1914 maps into one. Thus we have the detailed "Map of the Land of Oz" embedded within the "Map of the Countries Surrounding the Land of Oz."

One correction that I suspect Snow might have personally asked for is that the "corn ear" that was used to represent Jack Pumpkinhead on earlier Reilly & Lee maps has been replaced with a drawing of Jack's head. The map also has the mountains drawn in the representational style I associate with Tolkien maps, where you see the profiles of the mountains instead of the more topographical view used in the earlier maps.

The last odd design choice was that the Deadly Desert is populated with assorted cactus, cattle skulls, broken wagon wheels, and the like. Ride 'em cowboy!

The map was reused two years later in the first Reilly & Lee edition of The Wizard of Oz, which was otherwise illustrated by Dale Ulrey. But in this 1956 edition of Wizard the map is reproduced in color!

1956 Map of the Land of Oz - Click to enlarge.

As you can see, the staff artist that colored the map also eliminated the countries surrounding Oz. And then, coloring the area beyond the desert a couple shades of blue, they have given the impression that Oz and its Deadly Desert is surrounded by an ocean rather than the usual adjacent countries.

Next week we'll look at the last map printed in any of the main forty Oz titles. See you then!
Click here to go to our next Map of Oz Monday post!

Map of Oz Monday - The Fairylogue Map

Today we begin a new blog series on mapping the Land of Oz. I hope to be be able to cover most of the known Oz maps in the coming weeks, but there are an awful lot of them. The photo above (from a display at an Oz convention in the early 1980s) shows only a few. I hope, too, that there will be a lot of discussion about all this in the comments section of each blog post. Who knows, all this analysis and exploration of Ozian geography might just result in a couple new maps! Shall we set off on our journey? I'm ready - my only advice is to leave your compass at home - they seem to be unreliable in the Land of Oz!

The earliest known map of Oz was created for L. Frank Baum's 1908 touring lecture series The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays. This map was created as a magic-lantern slide and projected on a large screen while L. Frank Baum introduced his audience to his fairyland.

The earliest Map of the Land of Oz - circa 1908

Below is a portion of L. Frank Baum's original Fairylogue script describing this earliest map of the Land of Oz to his 1908 audience:

"I will now show you a map of Oz, so you will understand my story better. You see, the Land of Oz is divided into four parts, that at the North being the Country of the Gillikins, the East the Country of the Munchkins; the South the Country of the Quadlings, and the West the Country of the Winkies. It was in the Munchkin Country, where you see the black cross [sic, actually a star], that the cyclone dropped Dorothy's house.

"Right in the center of these four countries, where their corners come together, is the beautiful Emerald City of Oz, which was just then ruled by a Wonderful Wizard; and all around this favored land, which is rich in fields of waving grain and pretty dwelling houses, and rich in the splendor of the magnificent Emerald City - a city built of gold and silver and set with thousands of precious jewels - all around the Land of Oz is a dreadful desert of deadly sands, which no mortal has the strength or the power to cross on foot. So the Oz people live all by themselves, and Dorothy was almost the first person from the big outside world who had ever come to this beautiful country. . . . So Dorothy took her basket, and followed by her little dog Toto began the journey to the Emerald City, following a road of yellow brick that led directly there."

Sadly there is not much detail on this map and most of the detail shown relates directly to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. We see the star showing where Dorothy's house landed in the Munchkin Country and the yellow brick road leading from it through a wooded area, crossing a large river and going into an even larger wooded area - or is that the Poppy Field? This doesn't follow the text of Wizard particularly closely - but then again this slide was not on screen for more than a minute or two.

Interestingly, when I scanned this map and started cleaning it up I realized there were faint images showing additional detail that has faded or worn off the glass slide over the years. There has always been lettering indicating a lake in the Winkie Country and in this enhanced scan we can see the faint outline of at least part of the very large lake. There is also another star which almost certainly indicated the castle of the Wicked Witch and future home of the Tin Woodman. No detail is shown in the Gillikin Country. I am fairly certain that the area in the upper right corner that looks like it might delineate a border of some sort, is in fact just a fingerprint on the original slide - though above the name of the country there does appear to be some dark residue that could be mountains or woods. The Quadling Country has more detail, though it's very hard to tell what it actually is. Is it a forest for the Fighting trees? The Spider's forest? Hills for the Hammerheads? All of the above? We do, however, get a nice little image of the palace of Glinda the Good. In the lower left corner is an area marked off for a legend or label of some sort. A few faint fragments of lettering are just barely visible, but it seems impossible to tell what it originally said.

Palace of Glinda the Good

The most unusual thing about this earliest map of the Land of Oz is that it is essentially square. Perhaps it owes its shape to the aspect ratio of magic-lantern slides? But then again, Baum's basic description of Oz works better as a square where all four countries are essentially equal in size, everything symmetrical in both directions. In the map we discuss next week Oz will have become the "great oblong fairyland" most of us are used to. No doubt the shape of Oz book endpapers contributed a great deal to stretching Oz into the more traditional rectangular shape.

It should be noted that there is no compass on this map and that the Winkies are on the left-hand side and the Munchkins are on the right-hand side. In the Fairylogue text Baum also clearly describes the Winkies as being west and the Munchkins as east, as he consistently does throughout his Oz books.

Another version of this map was published in the quite hard-to-find Wonderful Wizard of Oz Cook Book by Monica Bayley (Macmillan, 1981).

The map is even less detailed than the original, but I always liked that Bayley used the old Fairylogue map. The map is nicely reproduced and it does add a compass using the traditional directions. On a side-note, this little volume is really lovely and beautifully designed. It seems to have fallen off the radar of many Oz collectors. If you don't have one, keep your eyes out for a copy.

I can't close this blog without mentioning the sad history of the original Fairylogue slides. All of Baum's slides had survived and in the late 1970s belonged to Justin G. Schiller. Most of you know that he sold off his wonderful Oz collection in 1977. He sold the Fairylogue slides, too. They were purchased by an anonymous bidder and no one knows where they are anymore. No one has for over thirty-five years. Three of them were printed in full color on the back of Schiller's auction catalog - one of which was this slide showing the map. Justin had wisely made a set of Kodachrome slides as a back-up, which he gave to Dick Martin. These were shown in the early 1980s at each of the three major Oz conventions and then returned to Dick. However, when Dick Martin died, the slides could not be found, so now there is nothing. If the person who bought the original slides should happen to come across this blog, please do contact me and let us know the original slides still survive. They were an important piece of Oz history and it's pretty tragic that someone let them slip through the cracks.

OK, enough of that! Next week we'll look at the most important and influential pair of Oz maps from the endpapers of Tik-Tok of Oz.  (Click here for the next Oz Map blog post.)

Map of Oz Monday - The Surrounding Countries

Last week we looked at the 1914 Map of the Land of Oz from the first edition of Tik-Tok of Oz, so this week we'll be exploring the Map of the Countries Near to the Land of Oz from the back endpaper of that book.

Map of the Countries Surrounding the Land of Oz - CLICK TO ENLARGE

The most obvious and important detail on this map is that Baum has filled in the the countries beyond the desert with the geography from most of his non-Oz fairy tales: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, Dot and Tot of Merryland, Queen Zixi of Ix, and John Dough and the Cherub. Baum had first shown us that these places were in the same universe in The Road to Oz - but now we have geographical evidence of their proximity

It's interesting that Baum did not work Mo into the map, although he'd already introduced Mo into the Oz books with the Wise Donkey in The Patchwork Girl of Oz the previous year. And of course Trot, Cap'n Bill, and Button-Bright visit Mo before they travel to Oz in The Scarecrow of Oz the year following this map.

As in the 1914 Map of the Land of Oz Baum has added a couple locales that readers were not yet familiar with, such as Rinkitink, Boboland, and the Island of Pingaree. I wonder whether Baum added them to this map because he had hopes of one day publishing the 1905 manuscript King Rinkitink or if he already knew he would turn that manuscript into Rinkitink in Oz in 1916.

There are a few oddities and mistakes on this map. Hiland and Loland should be an island as it is clearly described as such in John Dough. If I were to put on my "rationalist" hat and say Baum makes no mistakes, I think I'd solve this by suggesting that when the tide comes in from that side of the continent - perhaps it isolates the central part of the two countries - surrounding them with water - rather like Mont Saint Michel on the Normandy coast of France. But in reality I think Baum just messed up. The Mifkits are supposed to be on an island as well.

The Country of the Gargoyles ought to be on top of Pyramid Mountain. And indeed the Gargoyles, Pyramid Mountain, and the Valley of Voe ought to be shown as being underground along with the vegetable kingdom of the Mangaboos. It's sort of odd to think that most of the events in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz were happening in Boboland!

The Land of Ev also has some problems. In the Oz Club maps which we will be discussing in a few weeks Dick Martin and Jim Haff felt that Ev should be expanded to include the area designated as the Dominions of the Nome King, as those dominions are supposedly under the Land of Ev. I'm not sure I like expanding Ev that much. I think the area shown as being the Nome King's is a sort of no-man's land - an inhospitable rocky area not fit for much life. Clearly the Nome King has control over some of the lands above ground as he had authority to install the Giant with the Hammer.

There is a bigger problem with Ev though - the geography and position of the Castle (actually the City of Evna) is supposed to be on a strip of land thin enough that from the castle tower Dorothy can see both the Nonestic Ocean and Ozma approaching on the Deadly Desert. A massive harbor would have really helped solve this problem!

Another problem is that the island of Pingaree is shown to be far too large. Pingaree is one of the few locales in the Oz books for which we have exact measurements: three miles by four miles. If that scale is applied to this map the Land of Oz is only about forty-five miles wide - this seems a little bit undersized. That said, if this section of the map is accurate to scale, perhaps Dorothy could just barely have a view of both the desert and the Nonestic from a very tall castle tower. Especially if Evna is at a substantial elevation. At this scale the Castle of Evna is about seventeen miles from the Nonestic shoreline. The track of the Magic Carpet shows the crossing as occurring near the country of Oogaboo. Yet in Ozma of Oz the party returns to Oz and visits with the King of the Munchkins. If the position of the Evian castle is correct it's hard to imagine any path that would take one from Ev to the Munchkin Country.

One thing I do find rather neat is the way Baum shows the mountain of the Phanfasms. It almost looks like there could be two peaks. We know from Emerald City that the Phanfasm's peak is tall and cylindrical  - rather like Mount Munch or "Devil's Tower" in Wyoming, better known as the mountain in the film Close Encounters.

I just wonder if seeing this indication of a double peak on the 1914 map might have been what sparked Jack Snow to write about a second mountain for the Magical Mimics. 

The one place shown on the map that Baum never wrote about is the oddly named Kingdom of Dreams. This has never sounded like a Baum locale to me. I hate to think what the dreams in such a place are like considering the unfriendliness of its geographical neighbors.

Many of the inconsistencies or oddities on this map might be blamed on the Woggle-bug, who presumably drafted this map since he's credited with the other one. I doubt he did his own explorations, so some error and misinformation are bound to have crept in. Perhaps he interviewed people when they were visiting the Emerald City for Ozma's birthday party?

This map, like last week's, features the non-traditional compass. This raises a question. Since this is an Oz map made by an Oz character from an Ozian point-of-view, does this imply that the whole continent of Nonestica had the east/west reversal?

And I have a question for all my readers - post your thoughts in the comment section. Given the backward compass in use in the 1914 maps there are two ways that could play out in the physical world. Do Oz folk simply call east what we call west - essentially just swapping the names. Or do you assume this means the sun still rises in the east over the Munchkin Country and from an Ozian point-of-view travels backwards from our own?

For a variety of reasons I think the sun rises over the Munchkin Country and sets on the Winkie horizon. I suspect there might even be some mentions of such in the post-Emerald City of Oz books, though I have not looked for one yet. But none of the mortals has ever mentioned that the sun appears to travel backwards through the sky compared to normal earth rotation. Any thoughts?

Next week we will continue this discussion with a look at the map from The Lost Princess of Oz.

Map of Oz Monday - Ojo Mojo

OK, boys and girls, we are setting off on a major hike through the Munchkin Country today. And Ojo and Realbad and Snufferbux are going to be our guides! Luckily Ojo has brought along the Oz maps created by L. Frank Baum and Ruth Plumly Thompson, and Snufferbux has his copies of the relevant texts.

Together we're gonna try to untangle what I see as the one terrible error on the Oz Club's maps, and that is the shifting of Ojo's and Doctor Pipt's homes to the northern Munchkin Country. Baum's map (and text) has them in the southern Munchkin Country.

Granted, there is a textual contradiction in Baum's The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914). In short, the club maps chose to honor a totally unimportant slip of the pen by Baum (a reference to the Gillikin Country) and thus made hash of the story logic (and often explicit detail) of Baum's Patchwork Girl and Ruth Plumly Thompson's Ojo in Oz (1933).

I will be getting into Baum's text in detail. But here's what we're talking about.

Baum's map on left, Club map on right - Click to enlarge.

On the left is Baum's map showing Ojo in the South near the Quadling border; on the right is the Club's map showing Ojo in the north with Dr. Pipt's mountain on the Gillikin border. Exactly who pushed for this change is not known. At least originally, Jim Haff followed the bulk of Baum's story and kept Ojo in the south as you can see in his master research map, below. (Remember that the Club maps show east on the right hand side of the map.)

Jim Haff's placement of Ojo in the south on his original "research" map.

In all likelihood it was either Fred Meyer or Dick Martin that "corrected" Jim's careful research and argued for shifting Ojo and Pipt to the north. Fred had a persnickety obsession with certain details and I can imagine him focusing in on that word "Gillikin" and not letting go. Dick Martin seems to me to have approached the maps from an "ease of drawing" perspective much of the time. And the northern section of Haff's Munchkin Country was kind of empty and it's also possible that Dick urged the move to simply fill up that space on the map. This is all conjecture; we simply don't know at this point what happened, only that Jim Haff's careful design was radically altered.

This may seem like a big fuss over nothing. What does it matter that one map shows Ojo in the north and another shows Ojo in the south? Well, it turns out to matter a lot, much more than I even realized from an Oz history perspective. In the Oz Club choice, all you gain is the chance to honor Baum's unimportant slip of the pen, "Gillikin."

But I think much was lost by that choice. Whereas, if Ojo and Dr. Pipt are in the south, innumerable details in the stories of both Patchwork Girl and Ojo in Oz make sense in story-telling logic and in geographical unity. This should not be surprising when we now know Baum had already mapped the Land of Oz sometime in late 1912 or early 1913, according to Gottschalk, and we know that Thompson was using the text of Patchwork Girl (and both Baum's and her own maps) in the writing of Ojo in Oz, as you will see further below.

Let me take you on a tour through the southern Munchkin Country! We'll explore both the various texts and the various maps.

The trouble begins when Ojo and Unc Nunkie run out of food and have to leave their humble cottage deep in the dismal Blue Forest. Ojo says, "All I've ever seen of the great Land of Oz, Unc Dear, is the view of that mountain over at the south, where they say the Hammerheads live . . . and that other mountain at the north, where they say nobody lives."

Unc Nunkie reminds Ojo that the Crooked Magician Dr. Pipt and his wife live on that mountain at the north. Ojo continues, "They live high up on the mountain, and the good Munchkin Country, where the fruits and flowers grow, is just on the other side."

So Ojo and Unc Nunkie set out from their cottage in the Blue Forest, heading north to get to the good part of the Munchkin Country that lies on the other side of Dr. Pipt's mountain.

Here we come to Baum's slip of the pen where he writes:

At the foot of the mountain that separated the Country of the Munchkins from the Country of the Gillikins, the path divided.  One way led to the left and the other to the right — straight up the mountain. Unc Nunkie took this right-hand path and Ojo followed without asking why. He knew it would take them to the house of the Crooked Magician, whom he had never seen but who was their nearest neighbor.

Baum should not have written that phrase about the Country of the Gillikins. He has already explained that Doctor Pipt's mountain is separating Ojo and Nunkie's home from the more fruitful plains of the Munchkin Country, these fertile fields being Ojo and Nunkie's destination. Based on Baum's previous text detail, the paragraph should have said something like: "At the foot of the mountain that separated the fertile fields of the Munchkins from the Blue Forest, the path divided."

Remember Ojo and Nunkie are explicitly journeying from their home, where they have no food, to the good part of the Munchkin Country. And remember, too, they are not journeying to visit Doctor Pipt. The Doctor is just a rest stop on the journey over the mountain barrier.

Back to the story . . . Unc Nunkie and Ojo take the right-hand path up the mountain. It must be a rough or steep climb, because they made it from home to the bottom of the mountain by early morning, yet they will be trudging up the mountain most of the day. They stop for lunch at noon and then hike for another two hours before arriving at Doctor Pipt's.

After the Liquid of Petrifaction accident, Ojo, Scraps, and Bungle decide to set off to find a cure. They continue on the path over the mountain, the same route Ojo and Nunkie always planned to take, into the fertile fields of the Munchkin Country. Baum writes: "Ojo had never traveled before and so he only knew that the path down the mountainside led into the open Munchkin Country, where large numbers of people dwelt."

After reaching the foot of the mountain they come to a brook which Scraps jumps across. They journey on, and shortly before sundown they meet a Munchkin Woodchopper who invites them to spend the night. They decline, as Ojo wants to press on with their journey. They walk late into the night, eventually coming to the house with the disembodied voice. The next day, after encountering the live phonograph, they meet the Foolish Owl and Wise Donkey (the latter says he is from Mo). They then free the Woozy and finally arrive at the Yellow Brick Road. This is not Dorothy's Yellow Brick Road but another one.

Now you might be asking, why did you cover all of that stuff in so much detail? What does it have to do with maps? Well, my friends, allow me to show you!  The events described above fit quite wonderfully into the pre-Oz Club maps! And with some surprising synchronicity, IMHO!

Below is Baum's 1914 Oz map. I have added indicated the paths (as described in Baum's text) in yellow, showing the the path from Ojo's house to the base of the mountain that separates Ojo and Nunkie from the fertile plains of the Munchkin Country. You can see the fork, where the path divides. Ojo and Nunkie took the right-hand path up the mountain to Doctor Pipt.

Narrow yellow line shows paths in the Blue Forest and path followed by Ojo to the YBR

I also added in the "second" Yellow Brick Road as it was not shown on Baum's map. It would obviously not be so straight, but this is more of a diagram to show how well Baum's text can be plugged into his own map of Oz. Note that there is even a "brook" or river for Scraps to jump across after they get down out of the mountain. This brook is on the original map; I only added the yellow path and road.

I firmly believe Baum wrote the Patchwork Girl text using his Oz map as a guide, though the map would not be published until the next year's Oz book, Tik-Tok of Oz (1914). We already have evidence that Baum drew the map in late 1912 or so (see this previous blog post). But in another unidentified 1913 newspaper interview Baum states: "the Land of Oz has grown to be a very real place to me. I have even mapped it all out, and its characters are known to me quite intimately."

Let's add another layer into all this. Ruth Plumly Thompson had clearly reread Baum's Patchwork Girl of Oz in preparation for writing her "sequel" Ojo in Oz. Below is Thompson's map of Oz. It is a tracing of Baum's 1914 map in which she has worked in the locations from her own Oz titles. I have added in essentially identical versions of the paths and Yellow Brick Road.

Thompson's map showing Ojo and Dr. Pipt and her own Bandit's Forest and Seebania from OJO IN OZ.

I think this map shows Thompson wrote Ojo in Oz using the 1914 Baum map as reference. And she has placed Seebania (the kingdom Unc Nunkie and the infant Ojo fled) just to the left of the Blue Forest where Ojo and Nunkie lived. And look where a path to the left would lead on Thompson's map - toward Seebania! No wonder Unc Nunkie avoided it.

Now what I also love about Thompson's geography here is that it justifies why (from an Oz history perspective) there is a second Yellow Brick Road and what two places it connects. The Baum and Thompson geography in Patchwork Girl and Ojo strongly allows for this Yellow Brick Road to connect the Emerald City with the old capital of the Munchkin Country, Seebania! This may well be constructive conjecture on my part, but there can be no dismissing the fact that Thompson meant Ojo's home and Seebania to be in the same general vicinity.

Below is a similarly modified version of Walt Spouse's beautifully detailed "Wonderland of Oz Map" showing the paths and Yellow Brick Road. I have added in Seebania (where Thompson has positioned it) and labeled the "brook" that Scraps jumps over.

Modified version of Walt Spouse's 1932 "Wonderland of Oz" map.

There are many subtle details from both books that can take on added significance once one begins to see the entire geographical picture. Of course Unc Nunkie avoided the "left-hand" path on the way to the fertile Munchkin fields; he knew it went to Seebania. When the Wise Donkey informs Ojo and the gang that he is from Mo, it's not surprising when one realizes Mo is just across the desert from nearby Jinxland, as The Scarecrow of Oz (1916) makes clear.

I think it makes much more sense for Dr. Pipt to have moved almost as far as he could from his old home in the Gillikin Country (where he knew Mombi) to the very desolate southern corner of the Munchkin Country. And in kind, it makes more sense to me that elderly Unc Nunkie, who fled the court of Seebania with a literal babe in arms, took refuge in the dark Blue Forest in the first empty cottage he came upon. 

Now, I do not particularly think L. Frank Baum or Ruth Plumly Thompson necessarily worked this all out in this kind of detail. But a literary fantasy land finds a life of its own as layer upon layer of fictional history is built up, as maps get modified, as characters grow - whether looking for adventure or searching for their pasts.

I think Jim Haff understood this. He brought his professional skills as a cartographer to this project, and as we'll see in the coming posts, he largely succeeded in compiling the various bits of research into a logical, geographic whole. Note that I'm not certain whether Haff paid any attention to Thompson's hand-drawn map of Oz. Still, his Munchkin Country generally followed most of the story points above. Here's my yellow schematic laid over his "research" map:

He has Ojo and Doctor Pipt in the far southern Munchkin Country, Ojo must journey over the mountain (visiting with Doctor Pipt at the summit) then down into the fields of the Munchkin Country. He has even got the Yellow Brick Road essentially connecting the old capital of the Munchkin Country (Seebania) with the Emerald City. This is because he followed the story logic and geographic sense. (Here the "left-hand path" through the forest is unresolved, but since Baum never specified where that path leads, Haff made no error there.)

Sadly, someone convinced Haff that that single word "Gillikin" mattered; and that wrecked the entire geographical and story-telling logic of two books. Here is the way the beginnings of Ojo's journey look on the published Oz Club map.

Ojo's route (indicated in red) to the Yellow Brick Road on the Oz Club map.

So, Ojo and Unc Nunkie want to get from their home to the fertile plains of the Munchkin Country. So they journey in the opposite direction of the fertile plains and climb a steep mountain for no reason. Ojo visits Doctor Pipt whom they were not particularly going to see, climbs back down the mountain, and hikes on over to the Yellow Brick Road. This seems a bit nonsensical to me, but, joy! - at least the other side of Doctor Pipt's mountain is in the Gillikin Country!

When Ojo and Nunkie's cottage was shifted to the north, that choice led to a major reshuffling of much else in the Munchkin Country. Back when Haff had Ojo and Nunkie's cottage in the south he had placed the majority of the locations from Ojo in Oz (1933) in the north. Below is the relevant section of Haff's original map:

Haff's "research" map - Routes of OJO IN OZ: Ojo's party indicated in yellow; Dorothy's party in red.

Haff's "research" map puts these Ojo in Oz locations to the north of the Yellow Brick Road used in The Wizard of Oz, the orange line at the bottom of the image. The route followed by Ojo and Realbad I've indicated in yellow: Crystal Mountain, Tappy Town, Unicorners, and finally Moojer Mountain. And the route of Dorothy and her rescue party I've indicated in red: arrival in the Blue Forest, traveling the Rolling Road to Dickseyland, and then the route Reachard leads them on toward the Emerald City, though they run smack into Moojer Mountain before they get there.

I don't really see why Haff placed these locales in the northern Munchkin Country. But when he moved Ojo to the north in the published club map all of this Ojo in Oz stuff moved to the south. I suspect this is Dick Martin trying to keep the density of "map detail" well spread out. Once they moved Ojo's and Pipt's cottages to the north there was a paucity of detail in the southern Munchkin Country. But from an "Oz as a real place" perspective, simply filling up empty space is a dumb reason, IMHO.

Below you can see how this affected the routes from Ojo in Oz on the 1962 version of the Oz Club's map.

1962 Club map - Routes of OJO IN OZ: Ojo's party indicated in yellow; Dorothy's party in red.

All this is now far to the south of the Yellow Brick Road from The Wizard of Oz. For some reason, too, Dorothy's group (red) is now traveling north of Ojo and Realbad's group (yellow). I can't see the reason for this change. But on the whole, I do prefer that this is all so much closer to Seebania than the original Haff layout had it. It makes for a geographical unity. Of course there would be even more geographical unity if they had left Ojo and Nunkie in the south where they belong.

In later versions of the Oz Club maps (1967 and on) this area gets heavily reworked yet again. I'm not keen on Haff's shifting the arrival of Dorothy's party to a different forest, the one where she met the Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion back in The Wizard of Oz. This change seems to have been made to angle the Rolling Road so that it can dump Dorothy and her rescue party into the river, as described in the text of Ojo in Oz (see below).

2008 Club map - Routes of OJO IN OZ: Ojo's party indicated in yellow; Dorothy's party in red.

As you  might have noticed, this section of the Munchkin Country is now a lot denser, too. All of the many locations from Merry Go Round in Oz were added to the map in 1967.

There are some other Ojo-related glitches and omissions from the Club's map, too. There is no river for the unicorns to bathe in, the fairly large village that Ojo and Realbad pass through is not on the map, and various mountains seen by the travelers are nowhere to be seen. The biggest mistake still not discussed is that the Oz Club's map places the Bandit's Cave in the northern central Munchkin Country. The bandit's cave is not actually on Haff's "research" map, so its inclusion in the published map may have been a late decision.

It it pretty clear Thompson wanted the Bandit's Cave in the same vicinity as the other locales from Patchwork Girl and Ojo. She has shown the Bandit's Cave (though she calls it "Bandit's Forest") on her map, directly above the "U" in QUADLING. [Update: it is also possible to view the "Bandit's Forest" on Thompson's map as being the hideout of Vaga and his men in Grampa in Oz. See "comments" below.] But in any case, this southern location for the Badit's cave in Ojo in Oz is very strongly implied in the text. Mooj throws Realbad into a deep ravine near the castle of Seebania. Realbad is rescued by the bandits and taken back to their cave, where he is nursed back to health.

But Haff has placed the Bandit's Cave in the central northern section of the Munchkin Country, quite far from Seebania. This seems like quite a trek for the bandits to carry an injured Realbad! The clear implication in Thompson's text is that the bandits and their cave are relatively close to Seebania. Indeed, at the end of Ojo in Oz Realbad decides to make the Bandit's Cave a sort of Royal Hunting Lodge where he will spend two months each year, and he allows Snufferbux the bear to use it for hibernation each winter. Clearly Thompson thought that the Bandit's Cave was close to Seebania and under Realbad's jurisdiction, not on the other side of the Munchkin Country.

I went back and looked at Thompson's map and after my recent rereading of Ojo in Oz I am convinced she was using the map in her text descriptions. She has given us a lot of detail on the boundaries of Seebania:

Long ago . . . the Kings of Seebania ruled all the southern part of the Munchkin Country, and the city where you now find yourselves is Shamsbad, the capital. When Ozma succeeded to the throne . . . my father, then King of Seebania . . . relinquished [his claim] to all the small countries at the south and retired within the borders of Seebania itself. This kingdom, still an immense but little known tract of wild forest land, is bounded on the north by the Munchkin River and on the south by the Quadling Country.

Below is Thompson's hand-drawn map, with color added to reflect what she has described in the Ojo in Oz text above. There is a river to serve as the north border, the Quadling Country is to the south, and it is an immense tract of forest land when compared to the usual size of minor countries in Oz. Given Realbad's view that the Bandit's Cave is part of his domain I extended the light blue area of Seebania to include it. This way of viewing this map even has a Yellow Brick Road connecting Seebania to the Emerald City. Thompson has, of course, traced Baum's 1914 map as her starting point and Baum clearly meant the Yellow Brick Road shown here to be that of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But I think the point has been made that we can get a pretty clear view of how Thompson saw her Ojo in Oz geography.

Thompson's Map of Oz showing Seebania as she described it in her OJO IN OZ text.

I am by no means saying there is only one solution to making an accurate map of Oz, but the Oz Club map makers seem to have never even considered this sort of contextual information. And in the end, considering the high-profile status the Oz Club maps have achieved, I think it is sort of a shame.

But then again, if the club's maps were perfect, look at all the fun I'd have missed writing this huge time-sap of a blog post!

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And after all that, how about an end note! I should mention the one other innocuous reason that I have seen given for moving Ojo to the north so I don't have to address this in the "comments."

When Ojo and Scraps meet the Scarecrow on the Yellow Brick Road the Scarecrow says he is on his way to visit Jinjur.
While this Jinjur reference is clearly more that a slip of the pen by Baum, it is also easily solved on the map. Baum's text shows Ojo and Co. are just inside the green area of the Emerald City. On Jim Haff's "research" map he has the two Yellow Brick Roads merge just after they reach these green lands. So the Scarecrow can indeed be walking away from the city to visit Jinjur without her having to live on the southern Yellow Brick Road (see Haff's map below).

Jinjur will find herself the focus of several legitimate "map" debates, but we'll save all that for a future post.