BAUM, L. Frank.
The Tin Woodman of Oz.
Chicago: The Reilly & Britton Co. , 1918.
$2,000.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-151862
+$450
First Edition of L. Frank Baum's The Tin Woodman of Oz
First edition, first printing of the twelfth Oz book in L. Frank Baum’s celebrated Oz series. First printing with the publisher’s spine imprint reading “Reilly & Britton”, the following year the publisher's name was changed to "Reilly & Lee". Quarto, original publisher’s full red cloth with pictorial label affixed to the front board, spine stamped in black with the publisher’s spine imprint reading “Reilly & Britton”, all edges stained yellow, black-and-white pictorial endpapers, illustrated with frontispiece, 12 colored plates and numerous in-text illustrations by John R. Neill. In very good condition. From the Michael Charles collection of L. Frank Baum and Oz books.
The Tin Woodman of Oz is the twelfth volume in L. Frank Baum's Oz series — the last to be published during Baum's lifetime — and one of the most emotionally resonant and narratively rich entries in the entire canon. The novel circles back to a thread left tantalizingly unresolved since The Wonderful Wizard of Oz eighteen years earlier: the fate of Nimmie Amee, the Munchkin girl whom Nick Chopper had loved before the Wicked Witch of the East enchanted his axe and transformed him, limb by limb, into the Tin Woodman. When a wandering boy named Woot challenges the Emperor of the Winkies to explain why, now possessed of a heart given him by the Wizard of Oz, he has never returned to marry his former sweetheart, the Tin Woodman is shamed into a quest that takes him, the Scarecrow, Woot, and Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter through a series of fantastic encounters before arriving at an unexpectedly ironic conclusion. The book is unique in the Baum canon for the richness of its extant manuscript sources — Baum's original manuscript is held at the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas, and an intermediate draft of two chapters is in the collection of Yale University, allowing scholars to trace Baum's revision process and the considerable skill with which he enhanced the story's emotional complexity. After a period of declining Oz sales that had extended back to 1910, The Tin Woodman of Oz reversed the trend with first-year sales of 18,600 copies — enough to make it a bestselling success — and the wave of renewed interest extended to earlier titles in the series as well, a reversal some scholars have attributed to a wartime hunger for the innocent fantasy worlds that Baum's books represented.
The Tin Woodman of Oz.
$2,000.00
In Stock
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