Follow the Yellow Brick Road

On exhibition in the Donohue Rare Book Room in the fall of 2012 were over eighty volumes from the Rare Book Room’s Dr. M. Wallace Freidman Collection of L. Frank Baum and Oziana. L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) wrote over thirty-eight children’s books, the most famous of which The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900 and later was made into a motion picture by MGM in 1939. Baum went on to write fourteen books in the series. Following his death, the series was continued by Ruth Plumbly Thompson. Baum also wrote several non-Oz titles, including Mother Goose in Prose (1897), The Master Key (1901), Phoebe Daring (1912), The Sea Fairies (1911) and Sky Island (1912) among others. The exhibition brought together a selection of Baum’s work, showing the breadth of his life’s work and a range of illustration by such figures as Maxfield Parish, W.W. Denslow and John R. Neill.