Rereading: THE ROAD TO OZ by L. Frank Baum

The sixth Oz book by Baum tries a different visual approach from the previous ones. While the cover and dust jacket (missing from my copy) are in color, all the interior illustrations by John R. Neill are black and white line art. Color is added through signatures of paper in different shades, the example above is described as salmon, while you can see a bit of the previous signature at left, light blue. When I read the book as a child, I thought the idea was to represent the different places in the story with different colors, but the text fails miserably at that, as one might predict, and some of the paper colors have faded a lot so they can’t really be identified at this point. The salmon one above bucks that trend.

The story also has some differences from past Oz books. It begins with Dorothy and Toto meeting a tramp or homeless wanderer known as the Shaggy Man outside Dorothy’s Kansas home, artfully depicted by Neill as wearing clothes full of curly tatters. He is an ordinary but kindly character, and he reveals that he owns a magic charm, the Love Magnet, that causes everyone to love him. The Shaggy Man is lost, and Dorothy offers to go with him a short way to direct him, which soon brings them to a small boy sitting alone in the road, Button Bright. Before long the three people and Toto have come to an impossible crossroads with many different choices. Dorothy suspects they have somehow gotten into a fairyland like the ones she’s been to before, and later a meeting with Polychrome, the rainbow’s daughter, confirms that. Polychrome is also lost, having fallen from her rainbow, and these characters travel on together through a variety of strange villages inhabited by talking foxes and donkeys, and meetings with a man who breathes out music and an attack by dangerous Scoodlers. Eventually they reach the edge of the Deadly Desert which surrounds Oz, where Dorothy has many friends, but how can they cross without being turned to dust by the destroying sand?

Another interesting thing that Baum does is tie the Oz books together with all the other fantasy books and characters he’s written about to this point, through the idea of a massive birthday celebration for Ozma, ruler of Oz. Introduced for the party are John Dough and the Cherub, Queen Zixi of Ix, the Queen of Merryland, Santa Claus, and more from his other books. I don’t know if Baum was the first author to thus create his own crossover universe, but it’s certainly an early one.

While the plot rambles, and there is little serious danger or urgency, I enjoyed rereading this one. I doubt later printings follow the tinted paper idea, but it would hardly be missed. Recommended.

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