A Thurber Introduction To The Wizard Of Oz
Just the other day a never-before-seen by-me 1960 paperback copy of The Wizard Of Oz turned up in a search. As you see, Introduction By James Thurber is featured on the paperback’s cover.
On the copyright page there’s this:
The piece, “The Wizard of Chitenango” was entirely unfamiliar to me, so I turned to my trusty copy of Bowden’s Thurber: A Bibliography. My hope was that the piece was collected in a book that sits on a shelf here in the Spill library. But no such luck. Unfortunately, it’s one of those stray Thurber pieces that was never collected. It only appears where it was first published, in the December 12, 1934 issue of The New Republic, and in this paperback edition and one later edition (shown above right). A beat-up copy of The Wizard of Oz is now on its way to the Spill library — I’m looking forward to reading this 91 year old Thurber piece.
Another item turned up the other day that I’d never seen before. Soon after receiving an email from a Spill visitor mentioning they had cufflinks bearing Thurber drawings, the cufflinks showed up online on Ebay (the seller says they were produced in 1948).
Vaguely related? Thurber’s “The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery” from The New Yorker, July 23, 1932.
