There is good news. I've been informed by the illustrator that there should be a new Lin Carter Oz book produced later this year. Lin's agent/executor Robert Price game Cowardly Lion Press one or more Oz manuscripts, and this should be the first that they produce. Don't look for it in bookstores--it's a fannish production. But by clicking on the picture below, you will be taken to the publisher's web page. By all means, send this guy an email, and encourage him to get the Oz tale into print ASAP.
--Ken, 5/7/01
I asked Noel Carter if she knew anything about Lin's Oz books, and this is what she said:
He loved the Baum books, of course, and collected
the Oz books. In the years after i left, he wrote a great deal of
fantasy that never got published. When i saw his last apartment,
after his death, i did see that he had, in his last years of illness,
been writing constantly. it was as if he knew he didn't have long,
and that he was writing down everything he could before the end.
The evidence of this was that in every room of the aprtment, and
on every surface, there were yellow legal pads lying about, covered
with his writing -- he wrote longhand and then typed things up later
--stories in progres, notes. etc. I found it very moving and so
sad, for I realized the import of what it meant, that striving to
put down the images and ideas that teemed from his inventive mind
before it was too late. Dreadfully sad!!
He also had file cabinets full of stuff, so that the Oz material
may very well be quite authentic, though in what state it was at
the time of his death I can only guess -- whether final or not,
I mean It may well have been, or it may well have been "edited"
by someone after his death. I really can't imagine.
