This probably isn't what you think.

See a book that lists Martin Gardner as an editor that is listed as an expanded edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and you'll probably think it's an annotated Wizard.

Sadly, it's not so. There is an annotated Wizard, but it's by Michael Patrick Hearn. And, yes, if you are a fan of L. Frank Baum, you probably want that, because -- in addition to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and a full (maybe too full) set of annotations, the Hearn book has W. W. Densow's illustrations in color, the way they were drawn to be printed. You don't often find the color illustrations, these days.

And, sadly, you won't find them in the Gardner/Nye edition. You get a text of the Wizard, which is fine, but only a small subset of the illustrations, and in black and white, not color. What the Gardner/Nye edition adds is an "Appreciation" by Nye and a medium-length biography of Baum by Gardner.

The appreciation is probably acceptable, although it certainly didn't excite me. The biography is problematic -- for instance, in discussing the second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Gardner talks about the army of women led by General Jinjur, and says that the stereotypic view of Jinjur's army probably reflects Baum's view of the Women's Rights movement. But it doesn't. Baum was a firm proponent of women's rights, and as a newspaper editorialist in South Dakota, he had campaigned vigorously for women's suffrage in that state. The reason that Jinjur leads an army of pretty young women is that Baum had an obsession with the theatre -- he hoped to turn The Marvelous Land of Oz into a drama, and to attract audiences, he wanted an army of chorus girls (such as had been included in the stage version of The Wonderful Land of Oz, which was about 10% Baum and 90% the work of the producer/director).

The appreciation and the biography both have a lot of problems like that. They were simply written too early, before Baum criticism and Baum biography became serious subjects and the necessary research had been done. So every part of this book has a better replacement. For the biography of Baum, there are several alternatives; my favorite (I haven't read them all by any means) is Katharine M. Rogers' L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz. A good appreciation can be found in Michael O. Riley's Oz and Beyond. And almost any edition of The Wonderful Wizard.... will have more Denslow illustrations than this book does. As it stands, the Gardner/Nye book is an attempt to stuff three different books into one set of covers. But they just didn't fit. ( )