In 1900, the year "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" was published, L. Frank Baum released another book as well -- one that has long been forgotten by most of those who ever knew of it and that was utterly eclipsed many years ago by the story of Dorothy and her three comrades.
Two books in a year was not particularly unusual for Baum, who was, after all, extraordinarily prolific and whose oeuvre includes (in addition to the 14 Oz books) such lesser-known works as "The Magical Monarch of Mo" and "Queen Zixi of Ix." His first book, published in 1886, was "The Book of the Hamburgs," a nonfiction work for adults that was described as a "brief treatise" on the mating, rearing and management of Hamburg chickens, based on his expertise as a chicken breeder.
The book Baum published in 1900 was not a children's book, either. But it had an effect on children in the sense that it had a small, but real, effect on Christmas as we know it in America. It was called "The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows," and surprisingly enough, it was about exactly that.
Why was one of the world's most creative novelists interested in the decorating of shop windows? In the 1880s, Baum had briefly owned and managed a department store in the small South Dakota city of Aberdeen. The store, Baum's Bazaar, failed, a victim of the hard times depicted in the early scenes of Dorothy's Kansas in "The Wizard of Oz" (along with a tendency to be too lenient with credit). Baum, then 34 years old, moved to Chicago.
In those days, just shortly after the advent of large plate-glass windows, there were few Christmas displays in America's department stores. The first show windows had merely piled up goods in more or less attractive patterns.
Baum was instrumental in changing ideas about what such windows should look like. In his book, he urged window dressers to think of the show window as the stage for a unique style of urban theater. A successful window display, he argued, should not simply show commodities and their prices but should let "objects tell some legible story" to capture the eye of the "passive throng" on the city streets. Machinery, he argued, is a necessary adjunct -- the half-revolving bust, illusion windows, the vanishing lady were among his suggestions.
