Reading L. Frank Baum's The Magical Monarch of Mo Aloud to My Son... and We Map the Oz Continent!

The Surprising Adventures of The Magical Monarch of Mo And His People
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Frank Ver Beck

L. Frank Baum wrote a number of different fantasies early in his career, before the runaway success of Oz (more down to the stage show) made it the one he came back to again and again. In what many cynically regard as an attempt to boost sales of those other books, he referenced many of them in The Road to Oz by having the rulers of the fairylands from them attend Ozma's birthday party. However, The Magical Monarch of Mo was not one of those.

Originally published: 1899
Acquired: ???
Read aloud: June 2022

This book was originally written under the title The King of Phunnyland and published as A New Wonderland in 1899, referencing Lewis Carroll. The book didn't sell too well to my knowledge, but after the success of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum and his publisher changed the title to The Magical Monarch of Mo and edited all occurrences of "Phunnyland" in the book to "Mo." Flip the "WW" of "Wonderful Wizard" upside down and you get the  "MM" of "Magical Monarch"! Phunnyland had actually been mentioned in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, bringing it into Baum's extended fantasy universe (when I read that one aloud to my son, I edited it to be "Mo"), but Baum linked it more directly to Oz later on. The Wise Donkey of Mo has a small appearance in Patchwork Girl, and Trot and Cap'n Bill visit Mo in Scarecrow of Oz.

It was this last reference that captured my son's imagination, as it established that in Mo, it rains lemonade and snows popcorn. Since then, he's asked us again and again about other weather phenomena in Mo. So, when we finished Royal Book so quickly that our copy of Kabumpo in Oz hadn't arrived yet, I suggested we read The Magical Monarch of Mo (rereleased with a comprehensive set of illustrations, complete with color plates, by Dover in 1968) while we waited for it, and he eagerly agreed. So if sales was why Baum did it, it worked on us. (Well, except that I've owned my copy since childhood.)

Magical Monarch isn't really a novel; it's more a set of fourteen short stories. Some are about the unnamed King of Mo; others are about his various children. They're usually comedic in tone, and use a kind of cartoon logic. The king loses his head to a Purple Dragon and tries various replacements; members of the royal family get trapped at the bottom of a lake of syrup; a prince gets smooshed flat by a giant's clotheswringer; a neighboring country attacks Mo with a mechanical giant; an evil wizard steals a princess's toe. Some are riffs on fairy tale structures (people going on dangerous journeys where things happen in groups of three), others are just short funny things. Many have ideas Baum would come back later in his career and integrate into Oz: people made up of parts of multiple people, mechanical men, immortality, odd objects growing on trees.

Some are better than others; some worked for my three-year-old son, and some went over his head. Mostly, I think, he delighted in the details about Mo: animal crackers growing on trees, cows that make ice cream, lakes of syrup, rivers of cream with strawberries. Some of the jokes are good for his age; others went over his head. (A fox with a sore throat cuts it out and hangs it in the sun to "cure" it, then puts it back. It's not like my son knows that meaning of the word "cure!") But he seemed to have a good time, and often repeated to his mother strange things he learned about the Land of Mo. He still occasionally asks me if ice cream comes out of cows in Oz, too.

Before we had even read it, he had illustrated the country based on its appearance in Scarecrow:

That's the Bumpy Man (the Mo character from Scarecrow) in his castle (the castle being my son's own invention).

While reading Magical Monarch, he asked where it was in relation to Oz, so I pulled up a picture of the International Wizard of Oz Club map of the Oz continent on my computer. (Mo doesn't appear on the continent map in the Tik-Tok endpapers.) This lead, of course, to a demand that we draw it ourselves, so I taped together four sheets of paper and this is what we came up with:

In some spots, he insisted I draw what was on the official map; in others, he came up with his own countries. So the countries of Aj, Bikker, Hedgehogboogi, Lotsoflands, Kook, and Makkafook are his. I named Aj (based on my theory that there must be an A and U country if there's an Ev, an Ix, and an Oz), but he named all the others, and drew many of them. He asked me where the yellow brick roads go, and I showed him where to draw the official ones in the Munchkin and Gillikin countries, but he thought the other quadrants of Oz deserved their own... though he never got around to doing the Winkie one (not that you would be able to see it if he had). He also drew one to connect Aj to Hedgehogboogi because the two countries are friends, and all the rivers are his work. He tried to get me to draw every island on the official map, but I put my foot down on that one!

It now hangs in a place of pride in our dining room, though he pointed out to me that it's too high up for him to touch it when he wants to ask me questions.

Next up in sequence: Kabumpo in Oz