The Oz Club’s calendar for 2019 celebrates our publication of Bibliographia Baumiana in two ways. Images and textual points from Baum non-Oz books used in the calendar come from the new collector’s guide. And each month a different collector shares the story behind how they came to have that month’s featured book.
Oz and Baum book collecting emerged early the Oz Club’s history as a common interest of most Club members. The Baum Bugle frequently provided bibliographic details of different books that establish publishing priority; details that clarified first and other editions. Because 
Baum’s publishers rarely indicated printing history on copyright pages, these details could only be found through extensive comparison of any given book. Dick Martin, David L. Greene, James E. Haff are credited with much of the earliest bibliographic work, which Douglas G. Greene and Peter E. Hanff expanded upon to publish Bibliographia Oziana in 1976. As more information was found, a revised edition was published in 1988.
Thirty years later, Bibliographia Baumiana is now available, too. This book (details here) establishes the publishing history of all L. Frank Baum’s non-Oz books. W. Neal “Bill” Thompson is responsible for making this happen, building on earlier research by Peter Hanff and the late Patrick Maund.
But back to the topic at hand; our 2019 calendar. Each year we pick a different theme for the calendar and this year Bib Baum was the hands-down favorite.
I solicited a dozen collectors about the copies of these books in their collections, and asked them to share their stories. We have Peter Hanff finding a Denslow-inscribed Father Goose: His Book decades ago, and Bob Baum loaning his inscribed copy of Mother Goose in Prose to the set of DREAMER OF OZ. Bill Campbell found his first edition Sky Island in its dust jacket at an antique show. Anne Corner’s John Dough and the Cherub has been passed through her family for generations. (Anne lives in Austria now, but her husband is from Wamego, Kansas, home of the Oz Museum!) Gifts, bargain buys, and the sense of triumphant discovery mark each story, making it an inspiring read.
As in past years, the dates in the calendar include all the trivia I could find tied to the theme. (By they way, sorry about that text block slip in June!)
The Oz Club calendar is not available for sale. It is our gift, with great thanks, to those who join the Club at membership rates of $100 or more. Thank you, again, to those supporters, as well as to those who contributed their stories, helped with proofreading, or otherwise contributed to the completion of the calendar. Top of that list? Bill Thompson, who’s incredible work on Bibliographia Baumiana will serve as an invaluable resource to Baum collectors as far into the future as any of us can see.
