After seeing the latest trailer of the forthcoming fantasy flick, Oz the Great and Powerful, and getting myself excited in the process, I found myself scouring the World Wide Web since yesterday looking for all things Ozzy. The goal in the internet trawling however was to find the "other Oz books".
Yes, there are other Oz books out there besides "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". In fact, The Wizard of Oz (yes, some editions of the book go by the shorter title, omitting the "wonderful" part) is just the first of 40 official books. Official, you may ask? Yes, there have been 40 "official" Oz books published and these have received the stamp of approval of the Baum Estate (the latest writer to don the hat of Royal Historian of Oz is Sherwood Smith and her latest Oz obra is Trouble Under Oz published in 2006). On the other hand, there are other Oz books out there including the popular "Wicked" series by Gregory Maguire.
Like other fans of Mr. L. Frank Baum, the place to start in anything Ozmanian is The Wizard of Oz.
I first read The Wizard of Oz when I was around 7 or 8 years old. I can't recall right now how I ended up with a copy but this Wizard of Oz book was a back-to-back, double-biller with the Jungle Book. Naturally, I read Wizard of Oz first and you could say that with Oz and the writings of one J.R.R. Tolkien creating an early impression on moi at such a tender age it's no wonder why I love reading books in this genre. Start 'em early, that's what they say.
Anyway, I learned later on that there were Oz stories beyond Dorothy and her journey down the Yellow Brick Road.
As a gradeschooler in St. Mary's Academy in Pasay City (I think it was in Grade 3), I discovered that the elementary library had several of the other Oz books. If my memory serves me right, the library had 13 of the 14 original Oz books including The Scarecrow of Oz, Tick-Tock of Oz, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, Rinkitink in Oz, among others. I remember feeling cheated out of the series because the only book that I did not get to read was The Tin Woodman of Oz and the library did not have a copy of it.
My memories of the different stories are now fuzzy so I guess that is what fueled my search for Oz books yesterday. Why online? Because as far back as the mid-2000's I already knew that the Oz books, at least those books written by Mr. Baum himself, were already in the public domain. In fact, I know I already had saved RTF-versions of the 14 books back then but I can't find them in my files. Yesterday, I managed to find four of the Oz books (not counting The Wizard of Oz, of course) in text-only version.
This morning I hit pay dirt as I managed to score epub versions of the 11 first books Including The Tin Woodman of Oz! Some good 'ole Google-powered keyword searching did the trick. Interested? Get the books through this wiki site.
I got the Oz book files in my Netphone to read with my FB Reader but I think these'll be more enjoyable if I use my wife's tablet 'no? This'll fill in nicely while I wait for Oz the Great and Powerful to roll onto the big screens.
