Books of Current Focus

Date: Saturday, 01 Feb 1997 12:31:32
From: Dave Hardenbrook <DaveH47 at delphi.com>
Subject: Ozzy Things

Okay, here's my ruling < fanfare :) >:
We will do the books in order, but instead of a Book of the "Month" per se,
we will have a "Book of Current Focus" (BCF) -- This will still allow people
to comment on other books (I hope -- I really don't want to deter people
from talking about what *they* want to), and we will just talk about the
BCF as long as we feel we have anything to say, and then we will move on
to the next...Also, I will announce the next book (obviously _Land_ in this
case) well in advance, to give people a chance to get hold of it and read
it, if necessary. I will *not*, however put the BCF discussions in a
separate Digest...I have *enough* on my plate! :)
 
So I will give everyone a week to get and read _Wizard_ (shouldn't be
too hard -- it's by far the easiest to come by) and then we'll let
the _Wizard_ discussion begin!
 
-- Dave

Press Release and Introduction

Atticus Gannaway

October 12, 2006

I am pleased to announce the official online release of a project that it has taken me more than three years to complete: a compilation of the Book of Current Focus (BCF) discussions from the email digest groups The Ozzy Digest, Nonestica, and Regalia examining all of the original 40 Oz novels by L. Frank Baum, Ruth Plumly Thompson, John R. Neill, Jack Snow, Rachel R. Cosgrove, and Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren McGraw.

Additionally, the BCF discussions cover The Magical Monarch of Mo, Dot and Tot of Merryland, American Fairy Tales, Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz, The Woggle-Bug Book, The Sea Fairies, Sky Island, and Little Wizard Stories of Oz by Baum; Yankee in Oz and The Enchanted Island of Oz by Thompson; The Forbidden Fountain of Oz by the McGraws; The Ozmapolitan of Oz by Dick Martin; The Wicked Witch of Oz by Rachel Cosgrove Payes; The Runaway in Oz by Neill; The Rundelstone of Oz by Eloise Jarvis McGraw; The Hidden Prince of Oz by Gina Wickwar; and The Emerald Wand of Oz by Sherwood Smith. More Oz and Oz-related books are slated for discussion in the future, and these discussions will be added to the archive as they conclude.

An ambitious (read: insane) archival project like this one generally happens by accident. I'd originally intended to collect the best few posts from each BCF discussion to enhance my enjoyment as I reread the Oz series. But as I went along, I began to realize the scholarly value of preserving in their entirety these insightful, erudite, witty, detailed digest musings about my beloved Oz books. It just took a little longer to do so than I'd anticipated.

Combing through the millions of words in the online digest archives to pick out BCF-related comments was a fascinating experience, an interesting lesson in human interchange and the distinct personalities that language can convey, and a sometimes frustrating exercise in deciding when to exclude from the BCF archive any number of mesmerizing tangents on history, music, film, art, politics, psychology, and the greater body of literature that were, nevertheless, tangents.

The final, staggering length of this compilation, as of this writing, is approximately 992,000 words. I thought it might be interesting to put this number in perspective. Collectively, the participants in these digest groups have authored a work longer than J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (257,000 words), James Joyce's Ulysses (350,000 words), J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy (470,000 words), Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (553,000 words), David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (600,000 words), and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (645,000 words)--though this does not yet touch the length of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1.6 million words). I am confident, however, that current and future digesters will be equal to that challenge.

Included in this archive is the series of valuable chronologies of each book's events, all created by Kenneth R. Shepherd. I have listed each book and the "official" start date for discussion of it (or, when no actual start date was set, the day that discussion actually began). The great bulk of BCF discussions occurred within that specific time frame, but not exclusively. Sometimes participants jumped the gun by starting a little early; sometimes a comment from significantly earlier in the archives seemed worthy of inclusion; and sometimes a much later comment on a particular book deserved a place in the archive, too. I have done my level best to make sure everything relevant was included for each book. As might be imagined, it was frequently difficult to determine when a spin-off from the main BCF discussion had gone so far in another direction as to be completely irrelevant to the book in question, but I felt it best to err slightly on the side of inclusiveness. (Within reason, of course.)

I am tremendously excited that this comprehensive resource does, at long last, exist. Reading through the BCF discussions is the equivalent of taking a sprawling college literature course on the Oz books. And who among us has never wished that such a class were available somewhere? (One person over the past nine years has maintained perfect attendance. Ruth Berman, a charter member of the International Wizard of Oz Club, has participated in every discussion since the BCF series began in February 1997.) L. Frank Baum would have been astonished at the sheer magnitude of the analysis of his work and that of his successors. I hope that this resource will prove useful as a scholarly tool.

Tyler Jones deserves my thanks for maintaining the online Ozzy Digest archives. I also want to thank Ruth Berman and J. L. Bell for their encouragement of the monumental effort involved in such a project; Dave Hardenbrook, for his efforts as discussion moderator of The Ozzy Digest and Nonestica; and Peter Hanff, for providing cover images of several books. Ivan Van Laningham, in addition to moderating Regalia, put a great deal of work into building the BCF archive website to house the text that I collected, and I am exceedingly grateful to him for giving my quixotic undertaking a user-friendly online presence.

This project is dedicated to the memory of Rich Morrissey, a thoughtful and engaging participant in the BCF discussions, who died on May 22, 2001. His last BCF post, during discussion of Thompson's Yellow Knight of Oz, appeared in Nonestica on May 15, 2001--the 145th anniversary of L. Frank Baum's birth.

I hope you will find much enjoyment and food for thought in these pages. I certainly have.

Atticus Gannaway