I had the distinct pleasure of introducing my much younger brothers to “The Wizard of Oz” this past weekend (on VHS, no less!). They weren’t as scared as I remember being of the flying monkeys. It made my mom and me reminisce about how much we loved the books, most of which we still have proudly displayed on the shelves in all their illustrated, hardcover glory.

For those of you not lucky enough to have my book-lover of a mother, there are many Oz books, each one strange and fascinating and sometimes outright disturbing. “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” the first of the Oz books, was pretty much an instant classic. L. Frank Baum wrote in his introduction in 1900: “…the story of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.”