“IN THE LIFE OF A WITCH, THERE IS NO AFTER, IN THE EVER AFTER”: FIRST EDITION OF WICKED, SIGNED BY GREGORY MAGUIRE

MAGUIRE, Gregory. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. (New York): ReganBooks, (1995). Octavo, original laminated pictorial boards, cartographic endpapers, original dust jacket. $1250.

First edition of Maguire’s immensely popular reinvention of Oz, boldly signed by him on the title page.

An established children's author, Gregory Maguire won immediate critical and popular acclaim for Wicked. "An intricately imagined expansion of L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz, it leaves Dorothy in the dust to tell the story of Elphaba (the name is a play on Baum's)? It was Maguire's childhood obsession with fairy tales, with telling stories and asking 'What if,' that led him to realize that in Baum's books, there is no evidence to support the Wicked Witch of the West's being wicked. We are only told she is. What if she's not?" (New York Times). Wicked became a blockbuster Broadway musical in 2003 and established Maguire as a talented re-teller of familiar fairy tales; his later works include Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999) and Mirror, Mirror (2003), as a well as two sequels to Wicked: Son of a Witch (2005) and A Lion Among Men (2008). With illustrations by Douglas Smith.

A fine copy.