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The coveted and award-winning Penguin Threads series continues with three more enchanting, beautifully sewn covers by a talented visual artist With paper and pen or needle and thread, storytelling has many traditions. Penguin's award-winning art director Paul Buckley presents Penguin Threads, a series of Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions inspired by the aesthetic of handmade crafts with specially commissioned cover art. Jillian Tamaki's embroidered artwork appears on The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Emma by Jane Austen, and Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. This latest set features three beloved classics for both adults and children with cover art by painter and illustrator Rachell Sumpter. Sketched in a traditional illustrative manner, the final covers are sculpt embossed and present full front and reverse hand-stitched designs. Through story, style and texture, the Penguin Threads is an exciting chapter in Penguin's long history of excellence in book design, for true lovers of the book, design, and handcrafted beauty. This fully annotated volume collects three of Baum's fourteen Oz novels in which he developed his utopian vision and which garnered an immense and loyal following. The Wizard of Oz (1900) introduces Dorothy, who arrives from Kansas and meets the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, and a host of other characters. The Emerald City of Oz (1910) finds Dorothy, Aunt Em, and Uncle Henry coming to Oz just as the wicked Nome King is plotting to conquer its people. In Baum's final novel, Glinda of Oz (1920), Dorothy and Princess Ozma try to prevent a battle between the Skeezers and the Flatheads. Tapping into a deeply rooted desire in himself and his loyal readers to live in a peaceful country which values the sharing of talents and gifts, Baum's imaginative creation, like all great utopian literature, holds out the possibility for change. Also included is a selection of the original illustrations by W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill. About the Author Lyman Frank Baum is born on 15 May in Chittennango, NY (near Syracuse). His father is a barrel maker, who subsequently goes into the oil business and becomes wealthy. As a young boy and then teenager he starts up several newspapers and a magazine. In his late teens he becomes interested in the theater, and his father gives him a number of theaters and operas in New York and Pennsylvania to manage. Marries Maud Gage. Her mother is a leading figure in the Women's Rights Movement of the time, and a close associate of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Baum's father dies and the family fortunes wane. A number of Maud's family have moved to the Dakota Territory, so Frank, Maud, and children join them in Aberdeen (South Dakota). For several years he operates a store, "Baum's Bazaar." It falls victim to hard times in 1890, so he turns to running the local weekly newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. When the newspaper fails, Frank and family move to Chicago where he takes a job as a reporter for the Evening Post. To make ends meet he also works as a traveling salesman for a china company. He develops characters and situation outlines while on these trips to help him with story telling to his children when back at home. Baum produces a traveling film show, a combination of theater and motion picture, titled Fairylogue and Radio-Plays. It is very expensive to produce and stage, and being for children it is not profitable, so it closes by the end of the year. (The film is subsequently released in 1910 by Selig as four short movies.) With several business associates, Baum forms the Oz Film Manufacturing Company. Their studio is located next to the Universal Film Company. They make a number of films based on the Oz books, but the movie audiences judge them to be for children and the films are not successful. At this early stage of the motion picture industry a children's market has not yet developed. In effect, Baum was before his time! So the Oz Film Manufacturing Company was sold to Universal. L. Frank Baum dies on on 5 May, leaving America bereft of its most beloved storyteller of the time. His last book, Glinda of Oz, is posthumously published in 1920.