2003
Peter Glassman
Peter Glassman’s personal love for Oz successfully drove the reissue of beautiful full-color reproductions of Baum’s Oz books, plus black-and-white reissues of Thompson, Neill, Snow, and McGraw Oz books—many with his original afterwords. He also managed the Royal Club of Oz for children who read the Oz books, and published numerous Oz pastiches under the Emerald City Press imprint.
As the founder and president of Books of Wonder in New York City, Peter operates a mail-order business, publishing imprints with HarperCollins Publishers and North-South Books, and a small-press publishing company. A frequent lecturer and author about Oz, children’s books, and collecting, he also has authored three picture books, and managed to work an Oz illustration into each of them. Peter contributed the Oz books and other props used in the romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, which used Books of Wonder as its model for an independent children’s bookstore.
His four catalogues of fine antiquarian Oz material have served as lasting reference books on early Oz/Baum editions as well as original Oz-related art. Peter’s centennial anthology, Oz: The Hundredth Anniversary Celebration, is a salute to Oz by some of today’s greatest children’s book authors and artists.
Books of Wonder has hosted any number of in-store books signings that have featured contemporary Oz authors and illustrators. Peter has spoken at Oz Club conventions, and at the centennial convention contributed enough facsimile copies of The Book of the Hamburgs for every attendee to take home a copy of this rarest Baum title.