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-five public-domain books they come from.
Which books
The shelf is the Famous Forty — the forty Oz novels published as one series between 1900 and 1963: fourteen by L. Frank Baum, nineteen by Ruth Plumly Thompson, three by John R. Neill, two by Jack Snow, one by Rachel Cosgrove and one by Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren McGraw Wagner.
That line is drawn on purpose. This site's whole claim is that everything on it can be checked, so the boundary of what counts had better be checkable too, and membership of a publisher's series is a matter of record rather than of taste.
There is one addition: Little Wizard Stories of Oz, Baum's 1913 collection of six short stories, which is not one of the forty novels but is Baum's and is Oz's. It is the reason the shelf holds forty-one titles and not forty.
Baum's other Oz writing is not here — the Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz newspaper series of 1904–05, and The Woggle-Bug Book of 1905. Both are genuinely his and both are out of copyright; neither is part of the series, and nothing on these pages is drawn from them.
Twenty-five of the forty-one can be read here in full. The rest are still in copyright in the United States, and the library says for each one the year it becomes free — one more most years from 2027, and the last of them in 2059.
The Book of Records
Oz has this idea already. In Glinda's castle there is a Great Book of Records, "in which is magically written everything that people do in the Land of Oz, just the instant they do it" (The Magic of Oz, chapter 3) — so that "nothing could be concealed from Glinda the Good, who had only to look at the pages of the Great Book of Records to know everything that had taken place" (The Lost Princess of Oz, chapter 2).
The difference between that book and this one is the whole method. Glinda's Book records what happens; this one records what was written down afterwards, by two authors, forty years apart, who did not always agree — and where they disagree it says so rather than choosing. What it takes from the Book is the habit rather than the magic: everything on these pages can be traced to a page of a book, and the page is named.
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-five 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.