Ozma of Oz was published by Reilly & Britton in 1907, the third Oz book and the first to bring Dorothy back as protagonist since the original. It is widely considered one of the strongest entries in the series — tightly plotted, genuinely suspenseful, with some of Baum’s most inventive worldbuilding.
Dorothy, traveling to Australia with her Uncle Henry by ship, is swept overboard during a storm and washes ashore in the land of Ev — a country adjacent to Oz, across the Deadly Desert. With her is Billina, a talking yellow hen (one of Baum’s finest comic characters — practical, irritable, and utterly fearless). They discover that the royal family of Ev has been sold to the Nome King by the previous ruler, and Ozma arrives with an army from Oz to rescue them.
The Nome King’s domain is one of Baum’s most atmospheric creations: an underground kingdom of jeweled caverns ruled by a cunning monarch who has transformed the royal family of Ev into ornaments in his palace. The heroes must identify and touch the correct ornaments to transform them back — but each wrong guess transforms the guesser into an ornament as well. It’s a genuine puzzle with genuine stakes, and Billina’s solution (she can see the ornaments that were alive because they are purple) is both clever and fair.
Tik-Tok, the mechanical man — “guaranteed to work perfectly for a thousand years” if regularly wound — is one of the earliest robots in fiction, and his matter-of-fact, purely mechanical personality anticipates much later science fiction.
Collecting Ozma of Oz
First edition (Reilly & Britton, Chicago, 1907): Cloth binding with pictorial cover, illustrated by John R. Neill.
Market values:
- First edition, first state: $300–$1,200
- Good condition: $150–$500
- With dust jacket (extremely rare): $1,500–$5,000
- Poor/worn: $50–$150