1. Frank L. Baum worked in many trades before he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, including publisher, poultry breeder, door-to-door salesman and newspaper editor.

2. He also enjoyed moderate play writing success, staging productions in a theater his father constructed for him. Sadly a fire consumed the location and destroyed the only known copies of many of Baum’s scripts.

3. When the time came to produce The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the publisher refused to pay for the colour illustrations that would become key to the success of the work, so Baum and artist William Wallace Denslow paid for the work to be done out of their own pockets.

4. The book’s bibliography is complicated because the text, colour plates and binding were produced separately and a number of changes were made following the first printing.