Book Report: The Marvelous Land of Oz

Evidently, it’s been well over a year since Your Humble Blogger read an Oz book. I assume that’s a shelving issue; I like them often enough to take one into the bathtub with some frequency, but my hand doesn’t fall on them.

Anyway, I just finished my umpty-’leventh time through The Marvelous Land of Oz, and I enjoyed it mightily. There were the usual startling jokes (somebody tells the moaning Jack Pumpkinhead not to worry about being made into a pie, but to look at it as better than spoiling, telling him it’s better to be a tart than a degraded intellectual), and a good deal too much Woggle-Bug for my taste, but the plot works better than most of them, and of course there’s lots of Scarecrow and Tin Man.

By the way, there’s a story I’m looking for that would be more or less contemporary with Mr. Baum, and is possibly by Mr. Baum himself. I read it in a book that is an anthology of “modern fairy tales” or modern fables or some such. The book had a L. Frank Baum story, I’m sure, but I can’t remember whether the really brilliant story I half-remember (about a princess and an elevator operator) is his. The other stories included, I think, an excerpt from Ted Hughes’s Iron Giant, and Charles Dickins’s’s “Magic Fishbone”. It was probably published in the seventies or eighties (at a guess from my vague recollection from the jacket, if I’m thinking of the right book). Wait ... my mad Google Skillz have just figured out that if I know two stories in a book, I can come up with it. And ... it’s the Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales. And the Baum story in that collection is “The Queen of Quok”, which is a good story, but not the one I was thinking of with the princess and the elevator operator. Well, I’ll get the book from the library and see if it’s in there. And it’ll be the wrong book entirely, most likely.

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.