Name: L. Frank Baum's Tik-Tok of Oz
Author: Baum

Ex Carta

While Baum had produced previous maps of Oz – the earliest known dating to c.1908 – Tik-Tok of Oz is distinctive among the series as the first to embed maps within the book itself, consolidating the scattered references of earlier volumes into a coherent spatial framework.106 The two maps in the book are presented as in-world artefacts, created by Professor Wogglebug, charting Oz and the surrounding desert and the ‘Nonestic Ocean surrounding the entire continent’.

The cardinal points are also plot points in Baum’s narrative, and define four central characters – the Wicked Witches of the West and East, and the Good Witches of the North and South. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Dorothy’s adventure in Oz, the compass directions of each region are ‘clearly specified’. Due to an error in this original edition, however, the map was printed in reversed form, the cardinal points of East and West with it. The error was corrected but since Baum ‘used this version for reference in later Oz books, the original error was compounded each time new locations were added – creating a virtually insoluble problem for cartographers’

The frontispiece map of Oz in Baum’s Tik-Tok of Oz re-orients the land with Munchkin Country at the top, a playful cartographic inversion. It reflects Baum’s expanding fantasy empire, treating Oz as a mutable, though still mappable, world.

 by L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) quickly became a phenomenon, spawning a hit stage musical (1902), the classic 1939 film, and thirteen further novels by Baum, who continued to expand and systematise his imagined geography. Baum’s main creative method was to develop ‘a secondary world first and let the story grow out of it’, and in Oz he found a setting which moved ‘from the background to the foreground’, his readers as much invested in the possibility of journeying to this fantastical land of both peril and wish-fulfilment, as the characters and stories themselves.104 The Land of Oz has been described as that region of possibility and adventure ‘just over the horizon’, beyond the familiar and the domestic; an early illustration depicting Dorothy facing away from the viewer, contemplating a setting sun and endless prairie, was replicated almost exactly by George Lucas in 

 (1977), when Luke Skywalker yearns to escape his mundane farming existence for an as yet undiscovered wider world.105

The Land of Oz has inspired writers from Ray Bradbury and Philip Jose Farmer to Salman Rushdie, and its mainstream popularity thrives: Gregory Maguire’s (1954–) dark fantasy novel 

 (1995) recalibrated the setting towards a more mature audience and became a hugely successful Broadway musical in 2003, and then a similarly popular film in 2024.

Cover illustration for Tik-Tok of Oz by L. Frank Baum