Monday, August 16, 2021

This Week's Oz Short Story

The final story in this year's edition of Oziana is "The Trunk in the Attic" by Robert A. Baum, and it's another little tale about the author's family's history. Here, young Bob finds a mysterious trunk in Grandmother Edna's attic, and inside are all kinds of treasures about his great-grandfather's life and career. The trouble is, it's a magic trunk that only lasts for a few minutes once its contents are exposed to light, and the race is on to get things out of it. But there is a cryptic clue to there being a second trunk!

This was a short, sweet tale of what could have been. I very much doubt there are a pair of magic trunks out there holding glass slides and costume pieces from The Maid of Arran, unproduced play scripts, cups Frank won for his flowers, and the like. But boy, if they were out there…

A few non-story items that need to be mentiond with this issue include the spectacular cover by Alejandro Garcia, entitled "Strolling Down Memory Lane". Since this is the fiftieth anniversary issue, it pays tribute to the art of W. W. Denslaw, John R. Neill, and Eric Shanower, as well as to The Movie. Also included is a reprint of the letter from the very first issue, written by Harvey Plotnick of the Henry Regnery Company, then the parent company of Reilly and Lee, giving the Club permission to use characters and incidents from the Oz books in Oziana.

And that will be it again for a while for the shart stories. I'll do these whenever there's a new issue of Oziana, but otherwise I'm going to have to hold off, as I have more pressing uses for my time right now. And I do have at least two other sources of short stories I want to tap at some point. Who knows, maybe by the time I get back to it there will be a new anthology or two as well. But for now, leaving it with Oziana just seems like the right place.

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