Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 50, no. 1 (Spring 2006), pgs. 30–42
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Bell, J. L. “Making Magic: How L. Frank Baum Drafted His Penultimate Oz Book.” Baum Bugle 50, no. 1 (2006): 30–42.
MLA 9th ed.:
Bell, J. L. “Making Magic: How L. Frank Baum Drafted His Penultimate Oz Book.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 50, no. 1, 2006, pp. 30–42.
(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with photographs and vintage advertising that have not been reproduced here.)
The Magic of Oz has long been one of my favorite L. Frank Baum novels, so I was delighted to learn from Atticus Gannaway that Baum’s handwritten manuscript for this book is in the collections of the University of Texas. I couldn’t immediately book a flight for Austin, but while visiting friends and their new baby I set aside time to visit the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The Magic manuscript isn’t listed on the center’s online catalogue because it was acquired before 1990, but it’s there.
To learn about Baum’s writing method, I examined each page of the Magic manuscript and compared that text to the published book, looking for how words had changed on their way into print. I also looked at the Tin Woodman of Oz manuscript in the same archive, though in less detail, and I reviewed the images of the Glinda of Oz manuscript on the Library of Congress’s website.[1] Finally, I drew on Frank and Maud Baum’s correspondence with Reilly & Britton as it has been published and cited in books and articles. Unpublished letters might offer new information that confirms or undercuts the conclusions in this article, but I hope that it will offer insights into how Baum created The Magic of Oz.
Baum described his storytelling method in a letter to publisher Sumner C. Britton on 23 January 1912:
The odd characters are a sort of inspiration, liable to strike me at any time, but the plot and plan of adventures takes considerable time to develop. When I get at a thing of that sort I live with it day by day, jotting down on odd slips of paper the various ideas that occur and in this way getting my material together. The new Oz book is in this stage. I’ve got it all—all the hard work had been done—and it’s a dandy, I think. But laws-a-massy! it’s a long way from being ready for the printer yet. I must rewrite it, stringing the incidents into consecutive order, elaborating the characters, etc. Then it’s typewritten. Then it’s revised, retypewritten and sent on to Reilly & Britton. By close application there’s about six weeks work on it. If I took my time I’d devote two months to getting it ready for the press.[2]
His previous letter, Baum admitted, had said that the manuscript for The Patchwork Girl of Oz was “written,” which apparently meant he had jotted down ideas on “slips of paper” and arranged them in sequence. But despite his jolly tone, Baum didn’t have “all the hard work” behind him: he still had to write the book! Baum seems to have been habitually optimistic about how far along his projects were—a situation familiar to editors.
Baum may not have worked exactly the same way when he wrote Magic as when he wrote his 1912 letter. At the end of his career he appears to have been in a race with his declining health to finish as many Oz books as he could, so he might have skipped stages. In any event, the two surviving manuscripts I examined in Texas include no “odd slips of paper” with ideas or a plot outline. They contain only one example of Baum “jotting down” ideas for later use: the first page of the Tin Woodman manuscript lists some names which never ended up in his books:
- Vooles of Voolville
- Kraux
- Krauque
- Divus
The only plot notes on the Magic manuscript date from after the first draft, summarizing the story page by page after manuscript page 53, apparently to keep track of the sheets.
Baum may have created detailed notes for Magic and then discarded them, but I think the manuscript shows otherwise. He spelled some characters’ names in different ways over the course of the manuscript. He prepared the ground for some plot developments which he never followed up on. Those facts tell me that Baum had not decided on all important details of the book before he sat down to write, but made many up as he went along.
It is all the more impressive, therefore, that Magic is one of Baum’s most tightly plotted Oz books. As in The Road to Oz, Baum used Ozma’s birthday to set his plot in motion—but he kept the birthday celebration itself to only one chapter. He wove together three tension-filled plots: sulky teenager Kiki Aru schemes with exiled Nome King Ruggedo to take over Oz using the magic word Pyrzqxgl; Dorothy and the Wizard visit the Forest of Gugu to create a birthday present for Ozma; and Trot, Cap’n Bill, and the Glass Cat seek a Magic Flower for the same reason. Each plot ends up affecting the other. First, Trot and Cap’n Bill become trapped, so they send the Glass Cat to find the Wizard. Then Dorothy’s party interrupts Ruggedo’s plans in the Forest of Gugu, causing Kiki to panic and transform the visitors from the Emerald City into animals. By a stroke of luck, the Wizard overhears Kiki’s magic word and uses it to render the villains harmless, but that is the last of the major coincidences, in contrast to Baum’s plotting elsewhere. The Glass Cat arrives in the forest, helps the Wizard retrieve his black bag of tricks, and leads him and Dorothy to the Magic Island. There, Dorothy figures out how the Wizard can rescue Trot and Cap’n Bill by using Pyrzqxgl. The resolution of each plot thus depends on developments in another. I suspect that Baum’s focused concentration on Magic may have contributed to creating a tighter, more interlaced plot than usual.
How Baum Wrote and Rewrote
Baum’s Magic manuscript consists of 133 handwritten pages (131 sheets because he wrote on both sides of two). I could discern five levels of writing and revision on those pages.
- First, Baum drafted his story, writing in a fountain pen in his distinctive left-handed writing.
- As he wrote, Baum crossed out and replaced some words. The spacing and ink indicate that these changes occurred during the same session. These changes are usually minor. For example, his second paragraph replaces “sky” with “skies” and “know nothing about them” with “are not aware of the fact.” He could even change his mind about a word in the middle of writing it: on manuscript page 9, he apparently started to write “pleasant” but after four letters crossed that out and wrote “good.”
- Baum also crossed out or inserted other words in a later pass through the manuscript, squeezing additions between lines. This stage was also when he inserted a couple of new pages into the manuscript.
- Still later, it appears, Baum penciled in a few changes in his left-handed writing. Again, these are minor: “never” in place of “seldom” on the first page, for instance.
- Finally, someone else—perhaps Maud, perhaps son Robert—made more pencil marks to help a typist. These are not changes but confirmations, spelling out unusual words and adding chapter titles. Someone with a pencil also counted the words on the early pages, perhaps to estimate if the manuscript was long enough to fill a book.
As Katharine Rogers describes in her biography of Baum, the surviving material for Tin Woodman includes two versions of the heroes’ hike from Ku-Klip’s cottage to Nimmie Amee’s. Originally this was an uneventful trip contained in chapter 19; that version appears in the manuscript at Texas. But Baum then drafted more dramatic encounters with the Invisible Country, Hip-po-gy-raf, and Swynes. The extended chapters 19 and 20 are in Syracuse University’s collection of Baum papers. He probably added this material after reviewing his first typescript but before he sent the book to his publisher. Overall, Rogers says, there are more differences between Baum’s manuscript draft of Tin Woodman and the final text of that book than are evident in Magic and Glinda.[3]
Baum did edit and revise the text for Magic, of course. He did not send his typescript of Magic to Reilly & Britton until 29 October 1918—about a year after he apparently finished the handwritten draft.[4] It then went through editing, copyediting, typesetting, and proofreading at the publisher. There is no way to tell from the manuscript alone when its words were changed to what appears in the printed book, or which changes originated with the publisher or the author. But Baum’s correspondence reveals that the biggest post-manuscript addition to Magic (discussed below) came a year after he had submitted the book and was requested by publisher Frank K. Reilly.[5]
In drafting Magic, Baum wrote out the action for a certain plot thread straight through to a dramatic moment. If the result was too long to fit into a single chapter, he went back and found places to break the action into pieces, marking each break with a horizontal line. When switching from one plot thread to another, he drew a line at the end of one chapter and then started the next, sometimes on a new sheet of paper. Later he added chapter titles, squeezing some in between lines.
Sometimes those chapter breaks and titles needed adjustment. Ruggedo did not originally make his entrance at the end of chapter 2; when Baum moved the Nome’s first speech to the end of that chapter, he added a new final paragraph (about the frightened sparrow flying away) to increase the feeling of danger.[6] The first line of chapter 10 was originally the last line of chapter 9. On manuscript page 68, Baum drew a horizontal line and started a new chapter titled “The Wizard Rescues Dorothy,” but that title was crossed out in pencil; its remnant in the book is the line of dingbats on page 148. At first chapter 18 ended with the Wizard putting his pincers back in his black bag and the sentence, “Then he sat down on the raft and tried to think what to do next.” Baum reconsidered, removed that sentence, and began chapter 19 two paragraphs later, after Trot had bade a dramatic goodbye to her friends.[7]
In a couple of cases a chapter title changed significantly: Baum first titled chapter 14 “The Loss of the Black Bag,” but that was replaced by “The Wizard-Fox learns the Magic Word.” (In the printed book it is “The Wizard Learns the Magic Word.”) At the start of chapter 22 someone penciled the alternative title “Dorothy has an idea”; perhaps Baum thought that chapter included the scene in which Dorothy thinks of how to disenchant the two nuts safely, which actually appears in the next. In the end, that title was never used.[8]
The biggest addition to Magic visible in the manuscript is at page 100, in what became chapter 17.[9] Baum first wrote, “after a while the water broadened and on turning a bend they [Dorothy’s party] came in sight of the Magic Isle.” But Baum crossed out “turning” and the words that followed and wrote new paragraphs on the backs of two manuscript pages. These paragraphs describe the second appearance of the Lonesome Duck. This brief episode has no effect on the remaining plot. In fact, it seems odd for Dorothy to break off her rescue mission in order to view the duck’s palace. But apparently Baum felt a need to fill out that portion of the book.
Another significant change does not appear in the manuscript, but shows up in comparing the handwritten pages to the printed book. In chapter 10, after Trot and Cap’n Bill have gotten themselves rooted on the Magic Flower’s island, the narrative point of view shifts to the Kalidah that the sailor has staked to the beach. The beast laughs at our heroes’ plight, then manages to free itself and go off to have the hole through its body repaired. None of this action appears in the handwritten manuscript. The text of manuscript page 54 skips from “‘The horrid creature knew we’d be caught, and wouldn’t warn us.’” (on book page 116) to “Cap’n Bill took his pipe . . .” (on 118). Immediately after reading the typescript, Frank Reilly told Baum that leaving the Kalidah pinned to the sand was too gruesome (and the beast would still have been lying beside the lake when Dorothy and the Wizard arrived). Baum quickly and apologetically sent the new text, the only large addition to Magic after the manuscript stage.[10]
Baum’s Wording and Rewording
I had neither the time nor the attentiveness to catalogue every small alteration on the Magic manuscript and every difference with the published text. However, some of those changes and variations struck me as significant in showing how Baum developed his story, and how he imagined the fairyland of Oz.
The changes begin at the very start of the manuscript. Baum’s working title for the book was “The Magic of the Wizard of Oz.” Over that line, he pasted a scrap with two choices written in pencil: “The Magic of Oz” or “The Magic of The Wizard of Oz.” Including the word “Wizard” in the title would, of course, have echoed his bestselling book.
Though the Wizard’s magic plays a big role in Magic, the magic that drives the plot is actually the word that can transform anyone or anything: Pyrzqxgl. The second page of Baum’s manuscript introduces that word, underlined: “Pyrzqgle.” The following paragraph repeats the word twice, with the spelling that appears in the published book. But Baum did not stick to that orthography consistently throughout the pages that follow. Furthermore, he had two ways of writing the letter z, and his q could look like y or g. The spelling we know so well must have been settled on during the typing or typesetting process.[11]
The spelling of Bini Aru’s magic word is not the manuscript’s only inconsistency. The name of that Hyup magician himself first appears as two words, just as it does in the printed book, but after that his name and those of his family are always hyphenated: “Bini-Aru,” “Mopsi-Aru,” and “Kiki-Aru.” Baum also wrote the son’s name as “Kikki-Aru,” sometimes on the same page as the shorter form (as on manuscript page 64).[12] Baum’s typist or typesetter apparently stuck to the earliest, two-word form of the Hyups’ names and the earliest, shorter spelling of Kiki’s name. Such discrepancies are strong evidence that Baum settled on details like names as he went along and had not written them out beforehand.
Magic is notable for the number of named animals in its cast: Loo, Ebu, Peeker, Tirrip, and so on. Baum seems to have created all those names at the moment of each animal’s first appearance, with one exception: Bru the bear was originally named “Niles.”[13] A more significant name change appears in Tin Woodman. The female Loon who repairs popped compatriots is named “Sal” in the manuscript but “Til” in the book. “Sal Loon” is the sort of pun Baum enjoyed, but would have been politically awkward for a children’s author one year after Congress passed the Prohibition Amendment.[14]
At rare times Baum left spaces to fill in later. On page 92 of the Magic manuscript, he left out the name of a tall tree the Glass Cat climbs, later penciling in “avacado.” (By the time the book was published, that had been corrected to “avocado.”) In the Tin Woodman manuscript, Baum left a blank space for the Tin Soldier’s song at the end of chapter 15. Neither that verse, originally published in Father Goose: His Book, nor any pointer to it appears on the manuscript page. Apparently Baum knew what he wanted to insert and provided copy for his typist.
Occasionally, Baum’s manuscript shows him changing direction as he wrote. On page 40 of the Magic manuscript, Baum wrote about the Wizard, “By means of the Magic Word he”—evidently planning to continue the sentence with something like transformed the goose into a walnut. But then Baum apparently realized that he could improve on that. He crossed out his first phrase and in its place wrote the passage that begins like this in the book:
“I want this creature to become a walnut—Pyrzqxgl!” he said aloud. But he did not pronounce the Magic Word in quite the right way, and Ruggedo’s form did not change. But the Nome knew at once that “Pyrzqxgl!” was the Magic Word . . .[15]
By putting into dialogue what he had started to simply describe, Baum made that moment more dramatic. And he added the suspense of the Wizard not getting the “Magic Word” quite right, and Ruggedo hearing it—a big improvement.
The Magic manuscript shows Baum wrestling with certain issues of wording peculiar to writing about Oz. One was killing. Baum seems to have decided to avoid using the word “kill,” though there is no question that the actions he describes would be fatal. On manuscript page 13, Baum first described Kiki saying, “I will transform myself into a lion and kill him.” Then, still working in ink, he changed “kill him” into “tear him to pieces.” Four pages later, on his second pass over the page, he added the exchange about how “It is impossible to kill anyone in the Land of Oz” that appears toward the end of chapter 3. The conversation between Ruggedo and Kiki in chapter 7 about how neither of them can be hurt was also an afterthought.[16]
Another troublesome issue for Baum was what pronouns to use for animals. By the grammar standards of the time, it was standard to refer to an animal as “it,” not “he” or “she.” But did that rule feel right for Oz, where animals think and talk just like humans? Corrections in his Magic manuscript show that Baum’s first instinct was usually to refer to animals as “he” or “she,” and then to change those pronouns in ink to “it.” Thus, Bini Aru as a cow was originally “he” (a gender feat in itself), but became “it.” Similarly, he changed “beasts who know” to “beasts that know.”[17] That shift could also go the other way: manuscript page 44 says, “Gugu the King turned to its counselors,” but in the printed book, the last two words are “his Counselors.”
Baum had the most difficulty of this sort with the Glass Cat, Magic’s most important animal character (as she would no doubt confirm). On manuscript page 23, he refers to the cat as “it,” but two pages later he wrote “her” before crossing that out and writing “it” again. From manuscript page 110 on, Baum uses “she” consistently, with no evident reason for the change.
Some small changes might hold big significance for Oz fans. People have debated Ozma’s age. In Baum’s later books she is clearly older than Dorothy, but how much older? The Magic manuscript gives a hint about how Baum pictured Ozma, but also shows that he wanted her age to remain ambiguous. On manuscript page 32, he had Glinda first describe her as looking “as fresh and fair as if she were fifteen.” But then he changed that to “…as if she had lived but a dozen years.” By publication, the twelve-year-old figure was removed as well. In the final text Glinda says Ozma looks “as fresh and fair as if she had lived but a few years.”[18]
The start of chapter 5 in Magic includes this sentence:
From a hundred towers and domes floated the banners of Oz, which included the Ozmies, the Munchkins, the Gillikins, the Winkies and the Quadlings.
The term “Ozmies” appears nowhere else in the Oz books. The context of this passage shows that it refers to the people of the Emerald City and the green region around it. In the past I wondered if Baum had derived the word from “Ozmapolitan,” which Reilly & Britton had used as the name of a newspaper promoting Land and the Queer Visitors comic page. Or was it a misprint for “Ozites,” a label Baum used in Dorothy and the Wizard, Road, and Emerald City?
In fact, the Magic manuscript doesn’t contain the word “Ozmies” at all. On page 21 Baum wrote that the banners of Oz “included Ozma’s banner and the banners of the four countries of the Munchkins, the Gillikins, the Winkies and the Quadlings.” The mysterious term “Ozmies” probably originated as a misreading of “Ozma’s.” The manuscript cannot tell us whether Baum made that change himself or accepted a change by others, whether it appeared first in the typescript or the proofs, but it is clear that he did not originally intend to write “Ozmies.”
Another ongoing geographic mystery in the Oz series involves east and west. Because of the maps printed confusingly in Tik-Tok of Oz, many of Thompson’s Oz books and all of Neill’s put Munchkinland in the west, opposite where Baum always wrote about it. But Baum might have had similar trouble. On page 23 of the Magic manuscript, Cap’n Bill first says the enchanted flower is in “some lonely field up at the nor’west o’ here.” Baum later changed that line in ink to “some lonely place up at the nor’east o’ here.” In the next paragraph, Dorothy speaks of the northeast as well, and the directions remain consistent after that. (The word “field” in the original line indicates that Baum did not decide the flower would be found on an island until after he had started drafting the manuscript.)
Baum’s notes on manuscript pages 127–38 summarize their action as “Return to Oz with monkeys & magic Flower.” Dorothy and her party never went beyond the Deadly Desert in Magic, so what does it mean for them to “Return to Oz”? Either Gugu’s forest is outside the area that Ozma rules (which the leopard would surely confirm), or Baum used “Oz” here to mean the region of the Emerald City only.
Another thought-provoking addition appears in the Tin Woodman manuscript. That book contains Baum’s most detailed description of how Lurline enchanted Oz, in chapter 12. The manuscript originally stated that “…Queen Lurline’s people passed on and forgot all about it.”[19] On a second pass Baum changed that clause to “…Queen Lurline’s people left one to rule this land and then passed on and forgot all about it.” By the time the book was published that was clarified to “left one of her fairies to rule this enchanted Land of Oz…” Oz fans have long debated how to fit that passage into what Baum wrote elsewhere about Oz’s pre-Dorothean history. It may not settle matters to know that the mention of Lurline leaving a fairy after the enchantment was clearly an afterthought.
Baum and his publisher removed no long passages from the Magic manuscript on its way into print, perhaps because the book was already so short. But there are occasional small deletions of interest. Manuscript page 27 provides additional lines for Scraps’s song for Ozma, squeezed in diagonally:
I am patched and gay and scrappy,
You’re a fairy, wise and snappy.
Someone editing with a pencil, perhaps thinking that “snappy” was not the right word for the fairy princess, crossed out the couplet. A penciler also tried to cross out Scraps’s remark about the title of her song, but that survived into the book.
Two deletions concern Kiki Aru’s planning. Toward the end of chapter 1, the boy puts the paper stating the word Pyrzqxgl in a tin box and buries it in his family’s garden. The manuscript explains Kiki’s careful thinking: “If he forgot the word, even a small bird could peck among the stones and open the box and so get at the paper on which the instructions were written.” Later, chapter 4 ends with Ruggedo saying that “An egg is the only thing I’m afraid of.” Baum originally had another sentence in the chapter: “Kiki Aru decided he would remember that.”[20] The manuscript thus paints Kiki as more crafty than the published book. However, since Baum never returned to those possibilities in his plot, they became loose ends, snipped off in editing.
On manuscript page 30, after a mention of Ozma’s “early adventures,” Baum added an asterisk and a brief footnote: “see ‘The Land of Oz’”. That cross-reference did not make it into the printed book.
The Magic manuscript shows how Baum made small word changes to portray actions more clearly or accurately. For example, in chapter 2, Baum first wrote of “gold pieces, which Kiki knew to be money.” Since the boy had never seen money on Mount Munch, in the book that became “…thought to be money.” At the end of chapter 21, Baum originally wrote that the Glass Cat “did not notice” Dorothy and her party when they returned to the Emerald City. He changed that to “pretended not to notice.” A smaller change for accuracy is changing the magpie’s “bill” into a “beak.” At first the candy letters on Ozma’s cake spelled out “Dorothy’s Present to / O Z M A / on her birthday.” Baum changed that label to include the Wizard as well.[21]
Baum also made changes for style. The Magic manuscript shows Baum polishing his phrases in small ways. For example, on manuscript page 48 “glittered from the sun” becomes “glittered in the sun” and then “glittered under the sun” before Baum settles on “glittered in the rays of the sun.” Two pages earlier, he tried placing the phrase “branches from trees” in three different places in its sentence between when he first wrote that sentence and when it appeared in the printed book. In general, Baum’s revisions tend to be fussing over little things. He does not seem to have reconsidered large episodes, the sequence of paragraphs, or even the sequence of sentences once he had written them.
Baum did revise to bring out his characters’ personalities. On manuscript page 25, in the first scene involving the Glass Cat, Baum went back to the conversation and in ink inserted those famous words, “Look at my brains—you can see ’em work.” Having recalled this aspect of the cat’s characterization from The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Baum had her repeat the line twice more in the book. Another line that sounds familiar to Oz fans is the Lonesome Duck’s claim to be “only Duck in the Land of Oz.” This was also an afterthought, added to manuscript page 88.
Baum almost never reassigned a character’s action or speech to another character. One exception appears on manuscript page 112. At first the “sailor shook his head” at the Glass Cat’s muddy punishment, but Baum then gave that action to the Wizard and had Cap’n Bill fix the monkeys’ cage.[22] This change shows how the two older men served much the same role for their young companions, as a voice of wisdom tempering their emotional responses.
The path to publication smoothed out some of Baum’s writing quirks. He underlined many more words in his manuscript than are emphasized in the book. On manuscript page 74, he changed Dorothy’s words “must have quarrelled” to “prob’ly quarrelled,” adding the childish dialect that some Oz fans dislike. By the time that phrase reached print on page 154, the spelling and pronunciation had been corrected to “probably quarreled.” On manuscript page 125, Baum wrote of Ozma’s “fété” instead of “fête”—evidence that he was not well versed in French. The published text eschews all accent marks.[23]
The Reilly & Lee editors let other errors through, however, such as Baum’s consistent misspelling “cocoanut” and the name “Margalot” for Dr. Pipt’s wife.[24] In fact, the typing and typesetting process added a few errors to the handwritten text: “looking at his curiously” on page 39 was originally “looking at him curiously,” and the run-on sentence in the second paragraph of page 30 was two correct sentences in manuscript.[25]
I believe that Baum or the press made a few small changes after the book had been set in type in order to fit text onto a page, or a part of a page. Manuscript page 90 originally said that the Lonesome Duck “swam gracefully up the stream,” which Baum changed to “swam gracefully around the bend of the stream.” But when it came to lay out that text on page 182 of Magic, it would have run over onto the next page by a few words. (Neill’s art was already squeezed onto this page.) I suspect that Baum or Reilly & Lee cut that phrase to “swam gracefully away,” which just fits. Another example of cutting for page layout appears in the chapter titles. Baum’s title for chapter 20 was originally “The Monkeys have trouble with the Glass Cat,” but in the printed book it is merely “The Monkeys Have Trouble.” Baum changed the title of chapter 16 to “The Glass Cat Discovers the Black Bag,” but the book used his earlier, shorter version: “The Glass Cat Finds the Black Bag.”
The last significant change Baum probably made in the Magic manuscript appears on his “Foreword” (labeled “To My Readers” in the book), which he appears to have composed after the rest of the book. Baum first wrote, “from now on I hope to be able to send a,” then crossed off the last two words. He resumed: “give prompt attention to each and every letter with which my readers favor me.” He thus stepped back from a promise of replying to every fan letter, no doubt recognizing the gravity of his illness.
Baum’s Paper and When He Wrote
Baum composed his Magic manuscript on the backs of used sheets of paper, which offer a peek at other projects and clues about when the wrote. Manuscript pages 11–46 appear on the back of a carbon-copy typescript of a Mary Louise novel. Michael Patrick Hearn identified that source for the library, writing that Frank Reilly rejected this manuscript in 1916 as politically inappropriate for girls. The surviving pages offer a provocative picture of labor relations against the backdrop of the First World War. Its content is beyond the scope of this paper, and I hope someone reports on this fragment in depth.
Baum composed manuscript pages 77-82 on the back of “Ozcot” stationery that showed the covers of all of Baum’s Reilly & Britton Oz novels through Rinkitink. Baum used the same stationery as he reached the end of his Tin Woodman manuscript.[26] It might be reasonable to assume that he had received new letterhead showing his most recent Oz books and decided to use the outdated paper as scrap. However, the Bugle has reprinted a reply to a fan letter written by Maud Baum on this same stationery in March 1920, so the family was still using it three years later.[27]
A big clue to when Baum was drafting Magic appears on the backs of manuscript pages 115 and 116, which are carbon copies of a “Statement of Proceeds of Entertainment Given for WAR RELIEF FUND” of the Hollywood and El Camino Real chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution. This event took place on “Saturday, June 30, 1917.” Baum must have snatched this leftover paper after that date, therefore.[28] That timing matches the note written on the manuscript’s first page: “This was next to the last book Father ever wrote. It was written the fall of 1917.”
Baum added two pages to his Magic manuscript in 1918, apparently as he prepared to send it to Reilly & Britton for publication. One was his author’s note, the other his dedication, which he handwrote with the same line breaks that appear in the finished book and dated at the bottom. That dedication appears on the back of stationery from The Motorlife Company of California listing Robert S. Baum as the company’s distributor in Los Angeles. A typed version of the dedication appears on another sheet of Motorlife stationery. Perhaps Robert brought that paper to his father from his office to help in assembling the manuscript for the typist.
Sequence of Manuscripts
Related to the question of when Baum wrote Magic is the question of how it fits into the sequence of his manuscripts. In what order did Baum write his last three Oz books? For many years, readers assumed that Baum wrote Tin Woodman, Magic, and Glinda in the order in which they were published. Baum’s recent biographers have described him drafting his last three books in different orders, however.
In L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz, Angelica Shirley Carpenter and Jean Shirley wrote that before having gall bladder surgery in 1918, “he had written two extra Oz books, The Magic of Oz and Glinda of Oz, and stored them in a safe-deposit box as a kind of insurance. They were to be published if he became too ill to write a new book for each year.” Lower on that same page, they wrote, “Propped up on pillows, he finished The Tin Woodman of Oz for a 1918 publication date.”[29] Many readers have interpreted that to mean that Baum wrote Tin Woodman after Magic and Glinda. That sequence would have required Baum or his editors to insert the mention of the Tin Soldier in chapter 22 of Magic, but such a small addition to the typescript or proofs would have been easy since the soldier plays no role in the book’s plot.
The Magic manuscript undercuts that hypothesis, however. The book’s mention of the Tin Soldier is not an insertion, but appears seamlessly in Baum’s handwritten text on manuscript page 121. This section is an early draft, not a revision because Baum was still writing Kiki Aru’s name inconsistently from page to page. Nor could Baum have added this scene to the book as an afterthought; it’s Ozma’s birthday party, which Dorothy and Trot have been working toward for the entire plot. Therefore, Baum must have drafted Magic after he wrote Tin Woodman. But when did he write Glinda?
In L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz Katharine M. Rogers described Baum writing his last three books in this sequence:
| August 2016: | received Reilly & Britton’s approval for Tin Woodman’s plot |
| February 2017: | finished a draft of Glinda |
| 2017: | completed and delivered Tin Woodman |
| 2017: | wrote Magic |
| February 2018: | finished a second handwritten draft of Glinda |
As the foundation for this reconstruction, Rogers cites the note in Baum’s handwriting on the title page of the Glinda manuscript: “MS. Completed Feb 17th / 1917 By L. Frank Baum.” She quotes several letters between Frank and Maud Baum and Reilly & Britton describing progress on all three manuscripts, fitting their statements around that 1917 date.[30] Rogers concludes that Baum finished a second draft of Glinda, now lost, on the same night he wrote out his brief will: February 17, 1918. The next day he entered the hospital for gall-bladder surgery. If we accept Rogers’s reconstruction, therefore, Baum finished his first and second drafts exactly a year apart—which would be a mighty coincidence.
After considering all the clues, I think that Glinda came after Magic and Tin Woodman. The only indication that Baum completed the Glinda manuscript in February 1917 is his note on the title page. That seems like very strong evidence, of course, but all the other surviving documents point to the book having been finished one year later:
- The first time Baum told Reilly & Britton about the book that would become Glinda was in a letter dated 14 February 1918, in which he claimed (with just a little exaggeration) that it was “finished.”
- Rogers writes, “a note placed with the Glinda manuscript says he finished it the night before he entered the hospital,” which was February 17, 1918. That same night he wrote out his will, so he was obviously anxious about his health.
- A note on the first page of the Magic manuscript says, “This was next to the last book Father ever wrote. It was written the fall of 1917.” Since the book he wrote next was not Tin Woodman, it had to be Glinda.[31]
I think the simplest explanation for that evidence is that when Baum dated his Glinda manuscript title page, he wrote the wrong digit at the end of the year. On the day he finished, Baum was gravely ill, worrying about how to support his family. He wrote “17” for the day of the month, putting that number in his mind, and then wrote the year as “1917” rather than “1918.” The new year was only seven weeks old. How many of us have written the wrong date on checks many months further into a year? This hypothesis explains why every other piece of evidence points to Baum finishing the Glinda manuscript on February 17, 1918, and why the manuscript dated “1917” is the only one that survives and is so similar to the printed text. Thus, I conclude that the traditional sequence of Oz books is correct: Baum wrote his last three Oz books in the order in which they were published.
Under this scenario, Baum drafted Tin Woodman, Magic, and Glinda from start to finish between August 1916 and February 1918: three Oz novels in a year and a half. After getting out of the hospital, Baum was confined to bed for the rest of his life. He worked as hard as he could at polishing his final stories. Only days after the Baums mailed the Magic typescript to his publisher, Maud reported, Frank was revising Glinda.[32]
Given that time pressure, it is not surprising that Baum’s last two books are considerably shorter than the novels that precede them. The first six Oz books that he published on resuming the series with Patchwork Girl average over 50,000 words in length. His last two are under 42,000 words, an 18% drop.[33] However, Magic’s brevity did not hurt its sales. Reilly & Lee sold 26,000 copies of the book in 1919, compared to 19,000 copies of Tin Woodman the previous year.[34] Such a large jump in sales was probably spurred by the publicity that followed Baum’s death on 6 May, but Magic’s gripping plot was a factor, too. Under pressure, Baum had produced one of his best novels, and his readers responded.
Sidebar: In 1965 or 1966, Edna Baum, widow of L. Frank Baum’s son Robert, told me how one day she stopped by Ozcot to see “Mother Baum,” as she called her mother-in-law. Edna found Maud Baum in the garden at the trash burner, burning up a trunk-full of her husband’s old manuscripts. Edna asked if she could have some, and was handed the three on top of the pile.
I believe that these were The Magic of Oz, The Tin Woodman of Oz, and Glinda of Oz. Edna gave the last to Kenneth Baum, and Kenneth’s grandchildren donated it to the Library of Congress in 2000. She sold the manuscript to The Magic of Oz to a Beverly Hills collector; later it was put up for auction, and finally it arrived at the University of Texas. I don’t know the route by which The Tin Woodman of Oz reached the same library.
Some time after my conversation with Edna (a year or two at the most), I worked for Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, the dean of antiquarian book firms in Los Angeles at the time. Jake Zeitlin and I drove all over southern California on company business, and he was a great storyteller. He told me on one of our drives that he had met Maud Baum during the Depression. Maud had asked Jake if Frank’s old manuscripts were worth anything on the market. He told her truthfully that they had very little monetary value at that time. I fear I had discovered what had prompted Maud to burn them!
I never told Jake or Edna how their two stories meshed. I was frankly appalled at the loss of those manuscripts, but there was nothing to be done so many years after the fact. Even in the 1960s, the prices for Oz-related items, though they seemed high, were minuscule by today’s standards, so I can well understand that there was little market value for Baum’s manuscripts in the 1930s. But their historical value to us was, of course, priceless. (Sidebar by Peter E. Hanff)
Sidebar 2: One page of the Magic manuscript contains nothing but penciled notes summarizing the book after page 53. But turn that pale yellow sheet over, and one finds the letterhead of the “Oz Toy Company, Manufacturers of Toys, Games, Novelties / Joliet, Illinois.” Beside that rubric is a drawing of the Woozy toy manufactured by the Oz Toy Company and discussed as an “Oz Oddity” in the spring 1997 Baum Bugle.
According to clippings reprinted with that article, the Oz Toy Company was formed in 1914 by six businessmen, three of whom had also founded the Oz Film Company. The Woozy toy “can only be made in Hollywood,” a local paper boasted. The toy firm apparently made a lot of Woozies, but not much money.
How did the Oz Toy Company arrive in Illinois by 1918? In an email dated 16 November 2005, Peter E. Hanff wrote of Robert Baum’s wife: “Edna Ducker Baum was of the family in Joliet, Illinois, that owned the Ducker Department store.” Perhaps that branch of the family offered to take over the toy business because they had better retail experience and connections.
[1] This article uses “manuscript” to mean an author’s handwritten text and “typescript” to mean the product of a typewriter.
[2] Quoted in David L. Greene, “The Writing of Two L. Frank Baum Fantasies,” The Baum Bugle, Autumn 1971, 14.
[3] Katharine M. Rogers, L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 230, 233, 284–5.
[4] Rogers, 231.
[5] Rogers, 233, 286.
[6] Msp. 10. Unless otherwise noted, all manuscript page numbers cited in this article refer to the manuscript of The Magic of Oz. Permission to quote from that manuscript and that of The Tin Woodman of Oz has been granted by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
[7] Mspp. 104-5.
[8] Msp. 117.
[9] This change is at mspp. 100-1, but in the original ink numbering at mspp. 99–100.
[10] Rogers, 233, 286.
[11] Atticus Gannaway noted this inconsistency in a posting to the Ozzy Digest email list, 8 August 1997. All Ozzy Digests are available at <http://www.put.com/oz/ozdi/index.html>.
[12] Baum’s first version of the description of Bini Aru’s wife did not name her. Later he went back and added “Mopsi-Aru.” Mspp. 1, 4, 64.
[13] Msp. 36.
[14] Tin Woodman msp. 21.
[15] Magic, p. 166.
[16] Msp. 38.
[17] Mspp. 2, 22.
[18] Magic, p. 75.
[19] Tin Woodman msp. 66.
[20] Mspp. 6, 20.
[21] Mspp. 9, 114. Msp. 123 compared to Magic, p. 251.
[22] Magic, p. 232.
[23] Magic, p. 255.
[24] Msp. 121. The firm changed its named from Reilly & Britton to Reilly & Lee in January 1919, when it was preparing Magic for a June publication.
[25] Mspp. 13, 9.
[26] Tin Woodman mspp. 109–15.
[27] “‘Dear Mr. Baum’: Letters to ‘The Royal Historian of Oz’,” Baum Bugle, 37:1 (spring 1993), 13-4. The books shown on the stationery do not include Wizard, then published by Bobbs-Merrill, or any of Baum’s pseudonymous novels. The letterhead does show Little Wizard Stories, John Dough, Sea Fairies (but not Sky Island), Phoebe Daring, and The Daring Twins. Thanks to Atticus Gannaway for bringing this reprint to my attention.
[28] The war relief accounting offers some historic curiosities of its own. The event, which involved punch, candy, and ice cream cones, raised $219. Expenses included “Cash paid for music, $4; Cash paid for Jap. help, $4.10.” The page lists several women by surname, but not Maud Baum.
[29] Carpenter and Shirley, L. Frank Baum (Minneapolis: Lerner, 1992), 117. As a biography for young readers, this book did not offer a scholarly citation for its statement, but the authors had access to the Baum Papers at Syracuse University.
[30] Tin Woodman plot: Rogers, 180. Rogers calls the hypothetical February 1917 draft of Glinda a “first draft” on page 224 and an “original draft” on page 287; in the latter passage, she uses the phrase “first draft” to refer to her scenario’s second, February 1918 version, which survives. Rogers also writes, “the [surviving Glinda] manuscript is dated February 1918”; 287.
[31] Rogers, 223-4, 284. Baum’s 14 February 1918 letter enclosed the proofs for Tin Woodman, which he had finished checking. That letter told Reilly & Britton that he had yet another book ready beyond Glinda, which Rogers assumes was a sign of Baum’s optimism. I suspect that he was referring to Animal Fairy Tales; the top page of the Glinda manuscript shows that Baum thought Reilly & Britton should publish that volume in 1921.
[32] Rogers, 234, 238
[33] Baum’s first five Oz books were shorter than the next seven, and thus closer to the length of Magic and Glinda. However, when we look at the last two books in the context of his later career, they show a considerable difference.
[34] Rogers, 285. As another benchmark, the Geo. M. Hill Company sold 38,000 copies of Wizard over its first fifteen months; Rogers, 88.
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