The Wizard of Oz / how to decorate windows / dinosaurs
Heya,
I must have mentioned, at some point, my collection of extremely specific how-to books. Here’s a few of them:
I dunno, I love them. Want to be an actor? Grow soft fruits? Learn magic tricks? Buy stocks? Climb mountains? Tap dance, disco dance, go trout fishing, identify pebbles? Understand “your personality, and how to use it”? I’ve got a massively outdated book that can help!
I’ll have more to say on how-to books in general in a couple of months, probably, but for now I want to talk about one particular old how-to book: L. Frank Baum’s 1900 masterpiece The art of decorating dry goods windows and interiors.
Baum’s other 1900 release, The Wizard of Oz, is of course better remembered nowadays.
It’s always fun, I think, to see the weird book someone wrote before they were famous; to go “oh you know how Martin Amis wrote a whole book about how to be good at Space Invaders” or “Edgar Allan Poe’s first book was a guide to shells” or “Edith Wharton’s actually started out with a book about interior decorating”. And Baum’s book on shop windows is such a good example, a real mix of extremely practical well-informed advice and absolutely wild nonsense — how to stop your shop windows fogging up, how to clean them without streaks, colour theory, paint mixing, instructions for building shelves, techniques for draping curtains, sensible ideas for set dressing…
Winter Scene.—A good window for winter may be made by cutting down an old tree (or part of one) and placing it in the center of your window. Run cotton over the tops of the bare branches to represent snow, and sprinkle it with flitters.
…and then two paragraphs later there’ll be a suggestion for a window display that’s just not practical, Frank:
A Snow Storm.—Cover the bottom of your window with cotton batting (sides and top may also be covered if you wish). Dust well with powdered mica or white frosting. Place several incandescent lights, wire guarded, so that they are hidden from view by the cotton. Some of the lights may have red bulbs. Secrete several electric fans in various parts of the window, and, lastly, throw three or four pounds of goose-down into the window and start up the fans. You will not only have a regular snow storm, but a blizzard, and any central figure will be seen as having a fight with the elements.
I dunno, I just don’t believe he tried this one out before writing it down! And I'm not sure about Man With Really Long Neck either, even if he did include a handy diagram!
While I’ve been reading the book, I’ve been thinking a lot about this post from Robert Yang:
I keep coming across little details that make sense of why the Oz books are like they are, Baum’s equivalent of Yang’s random weird guys. There’s the Wizard of Oz himself, obviously — who rules a whole country with contraptions that, it turns out, Baum would have known how to make:
He led the way to a small chamber in the rear of the Throne Room, and they all followed him. He pointed to one corner, in which lay the great Head, made out of many thicknesses of paper, and with a carefully painted face. “This I hung from the ceiling by a wire,” said Oz. “I stood behind the screen and pulled a thread, to make the eyes move and the mouth open.”
“But how about the voice?” she inquired.
“Oh, I am a ventriloquist,” said the little man. “I can throw the sound of my voice wherever I wish, so that you thought it was coming out of the Head. Here are the other things I used to deceive you.” He showed the Scarecrow the dress and the mask he had worn when he seemed to be the lovely Lady. And the Tin Woodman saw that his terrible Beast was nothing but a lot of skins, sewn together, with slats to keep their sides out. As for the Ball of Fire, the false Wizard had hung that also from the ceiling. It was really a ball of cotton, but when oil was poured upon it the ball burned fiercely.
— The Wizard of Oz, 1900
Here’s Window Decoration Baum, one paragraph among many on colours and lighting:
Three electric bulbs, colored green, with wires made waterproof, are well insulated and enameled white and laid in the lower bowl. A few pond lilies and gold fish, together with other accessories suggested, makes a magnificent center feature.
— The art of decorating dry goods windows and interiors, 1900
And here’s Oz Baum:
“But isn’t everything here green?” asked Dorothy.
“No more than in any other city,” replied Oz; “but when you wear green spectacles, why of course everything you see looks green to you. The Emerald City was built a great many years ago, for I was a young man when the balloon brought me here, and I am a very old man now. But my people have worn green glasses on their eyes so long that most of them think it really is an Emerald City, and it certainly is a beautiful place[…].”
— The Wizard of Oz, 1900
(The coloured lights come back in the fourth Oz book too, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, even more direct, “five brilliant balls; one being rose colored, one violet, one yellow, one blue and one orange” that colour the country below them in shifting hues.)
Window Decoration Baum does a lot of thinking about jointed men and motor-driven figures:
Have the man’s knees and hips jointed and connected with a rod running through another slot in the floor and connected with a wheel underneath, so that the same motion is obtained as when a man rides a bicycle. One motor will operate both the man’s legs and the wheel of the barrow.
No wonder there are so many mechanical men all through the Oz books — the Tin Man, sure, but also Tik-Tok, and a huge giant who hammers the ground, and Jack Pumpkinhead. Here’s the scene where Tip builds Jack, before he comes to life:
For the body he stripped a sheet of thick bark from around a big tree, and with much labor fashioned it into a cylinder of about the right size, pinning the edges together with wooden pegs. Then, whistling happily as he worked, he carefully jointed the limbs and fastened them to the body with pegs whittled into shape with his knife.
— The Marvelous Land of Oz, 1904
Tip, Oz enthusiasts will recall, was later transformed into Princess Ozma and ruled all of Oz; as Ozma, she regularly carved new heads for Jack so that he could replace each old pumpkin as it rotted. I do like how practical all Oz's strange magic is.
Elsewhere in The Marvelous Land of Oz there’s the Gump:
The two sofas were now bound firmly together with ropes and clotheslines, and then Nick Chopper fastened the Gump’s head to one end. “That will show which is the front end of the Thing,” said he, greatly pleased with the idea. “And, really, if you examine it critically, the Gump looks very well as a figurehead. These great palm-leaves, for which I have endangered my life seven times, must serve us as wings.”
— The Marvelous Land of Oz, 1904
And y’know, there’s some relationship between the Gump and things like this “mechanical butterfly”, complete with instructions for "one-inch rods which open the wings” and “run through the floor to basement and are covered with same goods as background and are barely visible”:
Palms form the Gump’s wings; they also, Window Dressing Baum says, “add much to the finish of almost any background”.
The Oz books are quite weird, obviously. You may recall the origin story for the Tin Woodman, which is that he kept chopping off bits of himself and having them replaced by a local craftsman until eventually he was all tin. But I think only completionists will be familiar with the extended adventure in The Tin Woodman of Oz in which Nick Chopper — the Woodman’s original name — goes in search of his old fiancée, only to meet another tin man who underwent a similar transformation to his own; and in which the two of them go on to encounter Ku-Klip, the tinsmith who formed both their new bodies, only to discover that Ku-Klip had put their severed limbs to good use…
It occurred to me to piece together the odds and ends of you two people, which of course were just as good as ever, and see if I couldn't make a man out of them. If I succeeded, I would have an assistant to help me with my work, and I thought it would be a clever idea to put to some practical use the scraps of Nick Chopper and Captain Fyter. There were two perfectly good heads in my cupboard, and a lot of feet and legs and parts of bodies in the barrel, so I set to work to see what I could do.
— The Tin Woodman of Oz, 1918
…and in which they eventually find out that Nimmie Amee, who had at one point been engaged to both of them, has instead married the flesh man built from their old parts.
And look, I don’t want to oversell this connection and claim that all of Oz is foretold in Baum’s window decorating manual. The manual includes absolutely zero instructions for building a genuine flesh man, for example. But of course there’s something about Ku-Klip and his workshop and his cupboards of legs that resonates with window decorating and mannequins and jointed limbs, and a guy just putting things together, and the need for window dressers to have a workshop room “to keep wax figures when they are not in the windows”, as Baum puts it.
THE VANISHING LADY
I would say the part of the book that really made me get excited for its Oz connection was this bit, a suggestion for a particular optical illusion to use in your windows:
An amplification of the foregoing illusion is called “The Vanishing Lady,” and we reproduce a picture of a window in which this effect was a recent attraction. It occupied but a small space in the center of the display, showing the bust and head of a pretty young woman, supported on a thin pedestal with a large bowl top. From the waist down the young woman was invisible; at the same time one could see all around the pedestal, which produced a startling illusion. At short intervals this young woman would disappear right into the pedestal (or so it would seem), and presently would reappear with new hat, waist, gloves, etc. This would continue, showing every ten minutes or so a complete change of hat, etc.
Basically, you use mirrors and a performer to make it look like there’s a floating head in your window, and you give that floating head a fancy hat (in this situation, you own a fancy hat shop). The picture Baum gives in the book isn’t super clear:
But here’s a later version of the same illusion being used in some 1940s window-dressing:
And here’s Baum’s instructional diagram:
!!!!! of COURSE Baum was always gonna write a villain with a huge collection of heads:
Now I must explain to you that the Princess Langwidere had thirty heads—as many as there are days in the month. But of course she could only wear one of them at a time, because she had but one neck. These heads were kept in what she called her “cabinet,” which was a beautiful dressing-room that lay just between Langwidere’s sleeping-chamber and the mirrored sitting-room. Each head was in a separate cupboard lined with velvet. The cupboards ran all around the sides of the dressing-room, and had elaborately carved doors with gold numbers on the outside and jewelled-framed mirrors on the inside of them.
— Ozma of Oz, 1907
Anyway, strong recommend for The art of decorating dry goods windows and interiors. I have not yet read Baum’s very first book, The Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs, which is about fancy chickens, but obviously that has its resonance in Oz as well with Dorothy’s beloved chicken Bill / Billina (another joy of the Oz books is their cheerfully expansive attitude to gender). I’m taking the whole thing as a reminder to indulge my own weird little guys.
SOME OTHER THINGS I’VE ENJOYED RECENTLY
A BOOK: My friend Elizabeth Lovatt has a book out today (in the UK, coming later in the US): Thank You For Calling The Lesbian Line. It’s about lesbian helplines of the 90s (or at least, that’s the hook that everything else is hung off), and I haven’t read much of it yet but I was flicking through on the train and every page I looked at was a delight.
A PHYSICAL EXPERIENCE: Very into the sunlight that we had in Walthamstow this morning, even if it’s subsided a little now.
A PLACE: Terry and I went to Hertfordshire Zoo and there is a huge DINOSAUR PARK section, with a bunch of animatronics, and it is positioned on what must be just this side of a trademark infringement lawsuit. The font is not quite the Jurassic Park font, the little truck you can pose for pictures in while being fake-chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex is not quite the Jurassic Park truck, and if the Jurassic Park theme music is playing on a loop in the shop then, well, that’s something the zoo is entitled to do under the terms of their PRS license. I was a space kid rather than a dinosaur kid, but my brothers were dinosaur kids so it was fun to see a few species I still recognised. And also to encounter this one for the first time:
Why are its arms so tiny!!! WAY beyond the tininess of arms that dinosaurs are already notorious for! I didn’t write down what sort of dinosaur this was but I did find this article: Why These 4 Massive Dinosaurs Also Had the Tiniest Arms. So maybe it’s one of them.
That’s it for now, speak soon,
Holly