Several weeks ago I started posting photos of books from my Oz and Baum collection to the Wizard Of Oz Collectors United! page on Facebook. Jared invited me to cross-post them on the Royal Blog of Oz, so here we go.
Today I’m sharing photos of an item that I had sent to Sophia Bogle of
Save Your Books for restoration work. If
you’re a member of the
International Wizard of Oz Club, then you may remember reading a couple of articles
she wrote about book repairs in recent issues of the
Baum Bugle.
The item is a "steamer trunk" containing a set of six Christmas Stocking
Books, each with an introduction about the origin of the custom of
the Christmas stocking written by L. Frank Baum. These tiny little
books were first published by Reilly & Britton – the publisher of
the Oz books – in 1905. A later printing of the books was issued with
the cardboard steamer trunk around 1913.
I bought my trunk and books from
Wonderful Books of Oz, which is run by Cindy Ragni. The very fact that the books
were still housed in the original trunk means that they were relatively
undamaged, although they’re still fragile little books. Unfortunately,
the trunk itself was missing the lid.
Now here’s what’s cool. I remembered seeing
Bill Campbell's photos of his original trunk and books on his
Oz Enthusiast blog.
His trunk wasn’t missing the lid. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind
sending me a high-resolution scan of the lid (which was intact, but
detached), so that Sophia could use it to make a facsimile lid. Lo and
behold: not only did Sophia do a beautiful job with the facsimile lid,
but she also did some restoration work on the individual books, and she
made new glassine wrappers for each book, since that’s the way the set
was originally issued.
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