You're listening to imaginary worlds, a show about science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales,

and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky.

When I was a kid, I was not a big fan of the Wizard of Oz.

I mean, I recognize the performers were amazing, but the movie always felt kind of

stagy to me. You know, like I could still see the seams and the costumes, and I felt like the

camera was always about to catch a microphone like hanging above the actors.

So about 10 years ago, I came across the original book from 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,

written by Elfranc Bomb. The story is, you know, just like the movies, but the illustrations

were so charming. The shapes of the characters are really funny. They have these big heads and

little bodies, and they were drawn with really broad strokes. The expressions on the tin man

and the scarecrow were just as human as Ray Bulger and Jack Haley, but the characters really

look like they're made of straw and tin. And Dorothy is like this scrappy six-year-old girl who

really looks like she just ran away from a farm. And the lion is, you know, a lion, like a big lion,

which makes it even funnier that he's got like a little bowed his hair.

The artist was William Wallace Denzlo, or WWE Denzlo. I never heard of him.

Had he illustrated more classics, we probably would know more of his books, but you know,

other than the Wizard of Oz, he's pretty much forgotten.

That's Michael Patrick Hurn. He wrote biographies on Elfranc Bomb, who wrote the Wizard of Oz,

and WWE Denzlo who illustrated it. And the story of their collaboration is really fascinating.

So the two men met in 1893, the Chicago World's Fair. Bomb was, you know, going from one odd job

to another while he was working on his writing on the side. Denzlo was drawing cartoons for

first newspapers, and he wanted to get into something more creative. Now they were very different men,

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