Friday, June 19, 2015

The Latest Oz Reading: The Short Stuff

These are the books I got through in my recent Oz reading that were pretty short.

  • Sail Away to Oz by Marcus Méb&egave;s. An epic poem about a young man sailing off into an adventure in Oz. This is actually the second edition of this book, as an earlier edition came out in the '90s. This limited edition is handbound and richly illustrated.
  • The Way of a Lion by Jared Davis. This is an expanded book edition of a story that originally appeared in Oziana and won the fiction award for the Oz Club's research table. This is an origin story of the Cowardly Lion, as it relates how he was orphaned as a cub and never got to learn much of what it means to be a lion from his parents.
  • Oz the Great and Powerful: The Witches of Oz and Oz the Great and Powerful: A Magical Sticker Set, both tie-in books to the 2013 movie. The first is a pretty basic retelling of the events of the movie for very young readers. It has nice reproductions of stills from the movie. The sticker set is just that, stickers that you can stick onto pages of the book, or probably other places as well. Unlike the sticker books I had as a kid, these claim to be reusable.
  • And finally, The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum. This is not, however, the book, but Baum's scenario for a dramatic version of the story. No, despite his success as an author and the failure of many of his plays, Baum never lost his love for the theater, and this was at one point going to be his fourth Oz play. However, it eventually morphed into his first movie instead. But before getting there, he wrote this scenario to interest potential backers. Only one original copy is known to exist. This is also the last (so far) small-press hand bound book from Michael O. Riley's Pamami Press, and thus a treasure in and of itself. I have all of Riley's other Pamami books, so I wasn't going to pass this one up!

No comments: