To Oz on a Nook

One of the best things about using an e-reader, as I keep saying, is the tons of out of print wonderful books available now. (“Tons” I use metaphorically, because being e-books, they don’t weigh a thing.) I eagerly browse the OverDrive Gutenberg E-Books and have hit the jackpot a number of times. Lately, since it’s laid-back summertime, I have been reading the Oz books available in e-book format, and this makes me think about L. Frank Baum and the world he and others created. Up till now, I had only known him as the Oz author, but it turns out he was more of a polymath writer (A series of books featuring Aunt Jane’s Nieces, another documenting somebody named Mary Louise, and all available on our OverDrive page) Baum is most famous for Oz—a fascinating, pre-industrial society nevertheless marked by some of the stresses affecting late-19th-century America like women suffrage, agricultural depressions, and battles over currency (Oz strictly on the Gold Standard) An account of Baum’s beliefs about society is Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum by Michaeol O’Neal Riley and  Riley, Michael O’Neal. Lawrence, Kan., University Press of Kansas 1997) and there is also L. Frank Baum, Creator of Oz, a biography by Katharine M. Rogers. From these I learn that Baum raised chickens, was a petroleum salesman, taught school. He failed at farming in South Dakota. (The barren Kansas Dorothy flies away from makes sense in that context.)

It seems that Oz-iana, if there is such a term, collectible and memorabilia from Oz films and so forth, are an exciting area of collecting. All Things Oz  describes one man’s assemblage of objects, and offers extracts from some of the popular novels. So there is lots there for a newly awakened Oz-aholic. For me, though, the very best is the downloadable ebooks, whose only flaw is that they lack the John R. Neill and W.W. Denslow illustrations. I might work through all of the titles this summer—stopping not at the magical land of Mo, another alternative world Baum created in one book where the rain is lemonade and the thunder is Tannhaeuser, but I may not tackle Aunt Jane’s nieces this time.

Parenthetically, I note that the library wants to award adult participants in our summer reading program with a fresh new Nook—details on the drawing are here so nobody will be left out. I think that time in a hammock with a clutch of Oz books is an excellent way to cross the Deadly Desert—and end up in the Emerald City.