The latest from the all-Robert Baum 2022 issue of Oziana is "Memory Scraps". Wandering around the house and thinking about all the family heirlooms it holds, Robert spies an old patchwork throw and (as often seems to happen to him in these stories) he starts seeing visions of its history, going back to Matilda Gage making it with her daughter, Maud, and how it was used by Maud over the years, even after she married Frank. Of particular interest is when Frank notices the throw just as he's trying to think of a new character to feature in his next Oz book, the first one since Frank tried to end the series a couple of years earlier in The Emerald City of Oz. I particularly enjoyed the illustrations for this story, but I may be biased, as they're by Bill Campbell and Irwin Terry, who also illustrated the book I co-wrote, Queen Ann in Oz!
The final story is "The Trunk in the Attic", which is a rerun from last year newly illustrated by Mel Vavaroutsos, so that pretty much wraps this issue up. (By the way, I found that "A Momont in Time", from earlier in the issue, was also first published elsewhere, which I hope to tell you about soon.) It just remains to then mention the afterword, where editor Gina Wickwar and designer Jane Albright talk about their contributions to the issue and how it all came about, and the extensive About the Author, where Bob and Clare Baum talk about their Oz experiences.
And that's all the new stories from Oziana I have to talk about now. But some of you may remember that I skipped one issue in my reread of all the previeus issues. There was a reason for that, but now the time is coming very soon for me to trot it out at last and blog about that one as well! And by the time I'm done with that, maybe there will be a 2023 issue to talk about as well.
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