About this site
This is a reference to the Land of Oz as the books describe it: its people, creatures, places and treasures, and the twenty-four public-domain books they come from.
Everything here cites a chapter
The rule the site is built on is that nothing appears on a page unless it can say which chapter it came from. Every entry lists the chapters the thing appears in, and most carry the sentence that proves it — copied from the book exactly.
Those sentences are not decoration. Every one of them is checked against the book again each time the site is rebuilt, and a quotation that no longer matches the text is removed rather than published. The same is true of the passages under As the books describe them: they are the books' own words, verbatim, or they are not there.
How sure we are, said plainly
Claims are not all equally well evidenced, and the site would rather say so than flatten the difference.
- Most entries quote the sentence they rest on, and that sentence is re-checked against the book on every build.
- Some rest only on the name appearing in the chapter cited. Those are marked as such on the page.
- A few are marked not yet confirmed — recorded, but with nothing this site can show for them.
Appearing in a chapter and being mentioned in one are also kept apart. A character talked about while somewhere else is listed under Mentioned in, not under Appears in.
How this site is made sets all of that out in full, with the counts — how many claims there are, what evidence stands behind each, and what those numbers still cannot tell you. They are recomputed from the corpus every time the site is built.
Where the books disagree
Oz was written by more than one author across nearly thirty years, and they contradict each other. Baum puts the Munchkins in the east; Ruth Plumly Thompson agrees with him in Kabumpo in Oz and then reverses herself five years later in The Gnome King of Oz. Where the sources conflict, both sides are quoted and the disagreement is shown rather than resolved. The map is the clearest case.
Sources
The books are from Project Gutenberg, and the scans behind them from the Internet Archive. The twenty-four Oz books by L. Frank Baum and Ruth Plumly Thompson used here, and the illustrations of W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill, are in the public domain in the United States.
The 1939 MGM film is not public domain, and nothing on this site is drawn from it. Where the film and the books differ — the shoes are silver in the book — the books are what is recorded.
Corrections
The reading of these books is partly done by machine, and machines misread. If you find a citation that does not hold, a page that has run two characters together, or a description attached to the wrong thing, please say so. Corrections are the most useful thing anyone can send.