The Magic of Oz
There is a marvelous land beyond the desert.
The library
Every book, here in full
L. Frank Baum wrote fourteen books about the Land of Oz between 1900 and 1920, and Ruth Plumly Thompson carried it on after him. Twenty-four of those books are now in the public domain, and every one of them is here — whole, readable, and joined to a reference for the people, places, creatures and treasures in them.
One more comes free each January from 2027 to 2038, and the last of the forty in 2059.
Five ways in
The Land of Oz
All 287 places →
Munchkins east, Winkies west — Baum’s compass.
Who walks the road
All 664 characters →- Dorothy Gale A small girl from the Kansas prairie, carried to Oz by a cyclone with her farmhouse and her dog Toto.
- The Scarecrow A straw-stuffed man lifted down from his pole in a Munchkin cornfield, who wishes for brains.
- The Tin Woodman A woodman of tin, found rusted still in the forest and freed with an oil-can, who wishes for a heart.
- The Cowardly Lion A great beast who believes himself a coward and wishes for courage, met on the road through the forest.
- Toto Dorothy's little black dog, carried out of Kansas with her and rarely far from her side.
Start at the beginning
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
1900 · L. Frank Baum, illustrated by W. W. Denslow · 24 chapters
It begins on the grey Kansas prairie, with a girl, a dog and a cyclone. Every chapter is here in full, and each one ends with who and what appears in it.
How this is made
Nothing could be concealed
Of Glinda’s Great Book of Records — The Lost Princess of Oz, chapter 2
Nothing here is summarised from memory. Each claim on every page carries the book and the chapter it came from, so you can always go and read it for yourself. Where the books contradict each other, and after forty of them they often do, the contradiction is shown rather than quietly settled.
