The Wonderful World of Oz

 

QUESTION: Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve enjoyed the story of the Wizard of Oz I looked forward every Spring to the televising of the award winning 1939 film. As an adult, I ran across a copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz at a book sale. I had no idea that the author, L. Frank Baum, wrote so many books about the Land of Oz. So I began to collect Wizard of Oz memorabilia, including copies of Baum’s books. Can you tell me where Baum got his idea for the Wizard of Oz? And how collectible is Oz memorabilia?

ANSWER: Most people associate the Wizard of Oz with the 1939 movie of the same name. But the character goes back even further in the works of L. Frank Baum. 

Children looked forward to birthdays and Christmases when they could unwrap their favorite gift—a L. Frank Baum book recounting magical places, especially the Land of Oz. Children couldn’t get enough of them. 

Lyman Frank Baum was born on May 15, 1856, in Chittenango, New York. A prolific writer who wrote under six different pen names as well as his own, his first published book was a guide to raising fancy Hamburg chickens. When Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1898, no publisher would accept it. He insisted on color illustrations and publishers didn’t want to take a chance on the expense of that. In 1900, Baum finally paid the firm of George M. Hill in Chicago to publish it.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz filled the fairytale niche in American children's literature. Baum worked with the book's illustrator, W.W. Denslow, composer Paul Tietjens and Julian Mitchell to create a traveling musical stage play based on the book. Debuting in 1902, it brought its two leading men instant stardom. People flocked to see Fred Stone as the Scarecrow and David Montgomery as the Tin Man, in this production that featured chorus girls and songs about football. Imogene the Cow replaced Dorothy’s dog Toto.

After The Wonderful Wizard of Oz succeeded, children begged for more Oz books. Baum wrote at least one Oz book a year from 1904 on, at the same time completing other juvenile series. In 1910, he tried to end the Oz series with its sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz, by ceasing communication between Oz and the 20th-century world. Fortunately, the silence didn’t last. Baum published a new Oz book in 1913 and every year after until his final book appeared posthumously in 1920.

Despite success during his lifetime, Baum was unable to keep money in his pocket. He made a few bad business choices, including backing several Broadway flops, running a failed newspaper, and going bankrupt while working as a shopkeeper at his own Baum Bazaar in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He understood people having a hard time and gave everyone credit.

Following Baum's death in 1919, his publisher commissioned Ruth Plumly Thompson to continue the story of Oz from 1921 to 1939. The illustrator for the series, John R. Neill, wrote three Oz books, and more appeared off and on until the 40th book in 1963. 

The 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, was a huge success and generated enough collectibles from 1939 to the present to keep the most ardent Oz collectors happy. The variety of Oz collectibles included such items as a metal lunch box with original Munchkin signatures, sets of playing cards, Tarot cards, movie posters, cookie cutters, bookmarks, character glasses, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, Oz T-shirts, dolls, nesting figurines, books, buttons, paper ephemera, records, games, Japanese Hallmark Christmas ornaments, collector plates, jewelry, and handmade tiles. 

There’s even edible Oz----a can of funnel cake mix bearing the Tin Man's face and a bag of rainbow-colored marshmallows.

Wizard of Oz so ingrained itself in popular culture, memorabilia can be found everywhere, almost every day. It appears in live and online auctions, on eBay, in antique shops and flea markets, or in one of several Oz-themed shops. 

Some Oz collectors with unlimited budgets vie to own a piece of the historic movie. The dress worn by Judy Garland in the 1939 film, auctioned at Bonhams in London in 2005,  sold for the equivalent of $267,000 to a British collector. 

In August 2005, a thief stole one of four pairs of ruby slippers used in the 1939 film from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The slippers, on loan from a private collection in California, had an insured value of $1 million. 

One of the hottest collectibles is a little jewel box given out at the 100th showing of the movie that features a picture of the Cowardly Lion.

Learn more about the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz by reading "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in #TheAntiquesAlmanac.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the "Pottery Through the Ages" in the 2022 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

A Bookmark for My Love

 

QUESTION: I love to read, so I have quite a few bookmarks. Most are newer. But at several recent antique shows, I noticed quite a few older bookmarks, many of them featured hearts in some way. Were they given as Valentine’s gifts? I think I’d like to start a collection of some of these older bookmarks. How collectible are they?

ANSWER: Bookmarks have been around in some form or another for hundreds of years, ever since the first printed book rolled off the press in 1455. What a lot of people don’t know was that bookmarks were popular gifts, especially during Victorian times. And many people gave them as small Valentine gifts.

Over the years, Valentine gifts have taken many forms—cards, chocolates, even bookmarks. But whatever form they have taken, these expressions of love often displayed a heart of some sort.

People often gave bookmarks as gifts and as souvenirs or to commemorate a number of events. The heart shape in bookmarks often served to convey expressions of emotions, religious sentiments, or as a way to advertise products of the day.

Also called bookmarkers, these were important instruments for people to use to keep their place while reading. Surprisingly, a great many bookmarks are in the shape of a heart or contain some kind of heart motif.

At first, they were probably nothing more than a scrap of parchment. But as time went on people used a variety of objects as bookmarks. Eventually, printers created actual bookmarks with the primary purpose of marking a place in a book. Someone presented Queen Elizabeth I of England with a silk fringed bookmarker by Christopher Barker in 1584. 

Bookmarks became more common by the post Industrial Revolution. By the mid-19th century there was a convergence of improved methods in the book binding process and an overall increase in literacy. With improved book printing techniques, books became less expensive to produce, and more available to a lot of people. But no one usually read an entire book in one sitting, so bookmarks became a necessary way to mark the place where the reader stopped. 

Silk bookmarks were the most common from around the 1850s and were primarily intended for use in Bibles and prayer books. During the 1860s in Coventry, England, Thomas Stevens was experimenting with his looms and developed a jacquard technique for manufacturing colored silk pictures. He demonstrated these at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and the World's Fair Columbia Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Silk bookmarks, generically called "Stevengraphs," are typically 2 by 6 inches long. These machine embroidered silks became so popular that Stevens began producing them with American themes. Other companies also produced these  desirable and highly prized silk bookmarks. They were especially popular with the women in Victorian book clubs. 

Between 1850 and 1900, home-crafted bookmarks of needlework on perforated cards became quite common. Printing techniques dramatically changed from 1860 through 1900 and ushered in the “Era of Lithography." Names such as Currier & Ives and Prang were to the best known associated with lithography and chromolithography. 

Silver bookmarks became quite popular from about 1380. People still give them as gifts today. In addition to silver, bookmarks have also been made in brass, copper, nickel steel and Britannia white metals. With the turn of the century came bookmarks made of aluminum, celluloid and lighter weight paper. The heart motif can be found on bookmarks made of all these materials.

Because the shape of the heart has long been a symbol of love, affection, deeply felt sentiments, caring, concern and earnestness, its easy to see why makers of bookmarks often turned to the heart as a theme.

The intertwined cross, anchor and heart were often meant to represent faith, hope and charity. Was this bookmark a symbolic religious expression of late Victorian or turn of the century sentiments? Or was this possibly the bookmark of a tea captain? Or was it designed to be given by a sailor to his sweetheart or wife as a gift, a gift that would remind the recipient of the giver whenever a book was read? 

While hearts represent love, or positive feelings such as warmth and charity, they also were very useful marketing tools. A celluloid heart bookmark with a surround of blue and green forget-me-nots on the outside border advertised "Cunningham Pianos." 

Embossed aluminum bookmarkers fashioned in the shape of hearts were quite popular during the 20th century, especially for souvenirs. A 1901 heart bookmark with embossing read "Pan American Exposition, 1901, Souvenir" around the raised raging bull symbol. Another example features an embossed aluminum bookmark that bears + the Bunker Hill Monument.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the "Antiques of Christmas" in the 2021 Holiday Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Christmas Way Back When

 

QUESTION: Visiting historic sites around the holidays reveals a wealth of beautiful decorations and old-fashioned charm. But just how charming were those old-fashioned Christmas celebrations? What did people do before Hallmark Christmas movies?

ANSWER: While what you read and see on T.V. about how the Victorians celebrated Christmas is often exaggerated, many of the holiday traditions we still practice today began back then thanks to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. But one of the greatest influences on modern Christmas traditions was none other than Charles Dickens.

While he wasn’t the first writer to write about Christmas, and certainly not the last, he, nevertheless, brought a myriad of already popular traditions together in his novella A Christmas Carol.  

With luck,  there was snow. Twinkling, sparkling, clean, white, heart-warming old-fashioned snow. Nothing reminds everyone of an old-fashioned Christmas like snow—Dickens’ Christmas Carol had plenty of it, for this was the essence of a Victorian Christmas.

During the Victorian era from 1837 to 1901, people celebrated Christmas with special family gatherings, feasting, embellishing the home with decorations, and gift giving in increasing abundance. Victorians loved to decorate for the holidays. A giant fir tree, adorned with dried hydrangeas in shades of rose and pale green, lacy fans, white silk roses—a symbol of the Virgin Mary—German glass balls, and delicate handmade paper ornaments, held  together with lace garland, woven with ribbon and strung fresh cranberries, stood in the parlor. Many people believe that the Christmas tree evolved from the Paradise tree, a fir hung with red apples and wafers, representing the host, which represented the Garden of Eden in a medieval miracle play about Adam and Eve performed on December 24.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a period when the British were exploring and re-evaluating past Christmas traditions, including carols, and newer customs such as Christmas cards and Christmas trees. Both Dickens’ experiences of his youth and writings on Christmas by other authors, including Washington Irving, influenced A Christmas Carol. Dickens had written three Christmas stories prior to the novella, and was inspired following a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several establishments for London's street children. The treatment of the poor and the ability of a selfish man to redeem himself by transforming into a more sympathetic character are the key themes of the story.

Arrangements of fresh greens and holly, a pagan custom adapted by Christians, decorated Victorian homes. The color green came to symbolize the Christian belief in eternal life through Christ. Legend says that Jesus' crown of thorns was plaited from holly. It's said that, before the crucifixion, the berries of the holly were white, but afterward, they turned crimson, like drops of blood.

Greens hung from chandeliers. Pine roping, wrapped with  pearls and pink moire taffeta bows, draped the grand staircase.  Perhaps a small wooden tree covered with prisms stood on a marble-top  table. Another, covered in intricate origami birds, might have stood on a hall table. The crowning touch was a large welcoming wreath that hung on the vestibule door flanked by alabaster urns filled with gold tinged twisted willow and red poinsettias. But the most important part of the Victorian celebration was the family's creche, which featured carved figures of Mary, Joseph and the Christ Child set in a miniature village, complete with meadows, fences, windmills and ponds. flanked by poinsettias. Many believe St. Francis of Assisi created the first creche using live animals in 1223.

Gift giving played an important role in Victorian celebrations. The lady of the house would smile as she peeled back the tissue covering a heavily embossed sterling silver dresser set or opened a box in which a pair of gold and amethyst earrings nestled. On the more practical side, she might have received a steel chatelaine, a chain which clipped to the waist and held keys, a pencil, and a button hook. For a special evening out, she might have been given  a dress cape of black silk velvet trimmed with jet beads and ostrich feathers.

All of the above was fine and dandy for wealthy Victorians, but for the majority of people who worked long hours for subsistence wages—not unlike Bob Cratchet in Dickens’ beloved story—life was a daily drudgery and Christmas, for many, was just another day of the year, albeit one they had off.    

A Christmas Carol captured the essence of the mid-Victorian revival of the Christmas holiday. Dickens had acknowledged the influence of the modern Western observance of Christmas and later inspired several aspects of Christmas, including family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games and a festive generosity of spirit.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the "Antiques of Christmas" in the 2021 Holiday Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

The Art of the Scrapbook

 

QUESTION: I’ve been into scrapbooking for about two years. Last year I saw several older ones at a local antique show. One was rather plain, but the other was quite elaborate. The dealer wasn’t sure how old they were, but they looked like they could have been from the late Victorian Era. I’ve always wondered when the idea of pasting pictures and other items into albums began. Can you give me a little history of scrapbooking? 

ANSWER: Throughout the 19th century, scrapbooks that closely resemble what we think of as a scrapbook today began to to be popular. 

Historians believe the first recorded use of the term “scrap book—referring to a book with blank pages into which a person pasted items—was in 1821. People wrote the term as two words, "scrap book" or hyphenated as "scrap-book," but over time, the two words morphed into one, as it appears today. But it wasn’t until 1879 that people started to use the term as a verb,” to scrapbook.”

The invention of the commercial printing press in the early 19th century was responsible for the popular practice of pasting pictures and paper mementos into blank books called albums. Recipients began to view elaborately printed greeting cards, calling cards, postcards, prayer cards, advertising trading cards, and other materials as novelty keepsakes. 

Newspapers went into widespread circulation as well, and readers clipped everything from family mentions to recipes to historic news stories to save.

The increased availability of printed material sparked a new trend. People began filling blank, bound books—previously used for journals or artwork—with clippings, cards and printed memorabilia. Some of these books contained a mix of personal journal entries, hand-drawn sketches, and watercolors, along with various scraps of printed material. 

One of the most popular forms of early scrapbooks was the placement of calling cards into albums. Calling cards had long been used as a form of social etiquette, especially in England. Elaborate rules dictated how people were to use these cards to make attempts at social contacts and to accept or decline them. They were also used as a way to politely extend social greetings after an event like a birth or wedding.  

In a world where social elites hid behind a wall of servants, people didn’t just drop in for a visit. Instead, a person would drop off a card with the corner folded to indicate it was delivered in person. If the recipient wished to receive a visit, they would send their card as a reply. A card delivered in an envelope, however, was a polite brush-off.

Like so many other things in Victorian times, beautiful floral designs and pastoral scenes decorated these cards. The desire to preserve these beautiful pieces of full-color printing and remember friendships led to the growth of calling card albums. 

The Victorians loved decoration—the more the better. They also were very romantic and loved sentimentality and keepsakes. To fulfill their desire for decoration, they used embossed paper images called scraps. 

Also called die cuts or chromos, scraps were small and colorful and sold in sheets by stationers and booksellers. Their diverse subject matter included flowers, trees, fruits, birds, animals, pets, ladies and gents, children, historical people and events, angels, transportation themes, and occupational motifs. People pasted them into albums and also used them to make greeting cards and decorated boxes.

The first scraps originated in German bakers' shops as decoration for biscuits and cakes and for fastening on wrapped sweets. Printers produced the earliest ones in uncut sheets in black and white, then hand colored them. Scraps appeared in Britain in the 1850s and soon became popular as decorative additions to Christmas cards. They were also used to illustrate historical as well as events of the time.

Early in the 20th century, young ladies and children of the middle and upper classes began keeping scrapbooks that contained collections of commercially produced scraps. They organized them thematically with a single subject for the entire book or with several themes arranged by section.

Sometimes, they added lines of poetry, personal notations, inscriptions by family and friends, and drawings. 

Stationery stores sold scrapbooks with tooled leather covers, elaborately embossed bindings, engraved clasps, and brass locks. Some scrapbooks contained printed decorations on their pages, as well as centered oval, circular or square sections into which people could paste items. Other albums held printed pages with theme-setting embossed decoration-like flowers or birds. Many scraps keepers made their own albums by pasting scraps over catalog and magazine pages.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the Retro style in the Fall 2020 Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.