A cyclone drops a Kansas farmhouse in a country where the grass is impossibly green, the house lands on a witch, and a small girl inherits a pair of silver shoes and a long walk down a road of yellow brick. On the way she collects a scarecrow who is sure he has no brains, a tin woodman who is sure he has no heart, and a lion who is sure he has no courage, and the whole book is the story of each of them being wrong about himself.
Baum published it in 1900 and said plainly what he was doing: a modern fairy tale with the wonder kept in and the nightmares left out. No moral bolted to the last page, no punishment for curiosity, and a heroine who gets home because she works out what she has been carrying all along rather than because anyone rescues her. The shoes are silver in this book. They always were.
What made the 1900 first edition famous was not only the story. It was the first American children's book designed as one object: W. W. Denslow's pictures were printed in colour under and around the type, and the book looked like nothing else on the shelf. This edition puts that colour back. One hundred and twenty of Denslow's pictures, in colour, at the places the first edition prints them: twenty three full page plates reproduced from a research library scan of a 1900 first edition, and ninety seven cuts set in the flow of the text.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 196 pages, printed in full colour on heavy coated white stock, the first colour interior in our Classics run. Baum's own introduction and all twenty four chapters, entire and unabridged, with the 1900 title page reproduced as the frontispiece.
Hardcover: casewrap edition built for the shelf, the read-aloud years, and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same full colour interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
