Original Colors: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Though it has been depicted countless times on stage and screen, the marvelous land of Oz has an original and quite inventive color palette. The genuine colors of the yellow brick road, the field of poppies, the Cowardly Lion’s mane, the flying monkeys, Toto, and the great Emerald City are preserved in the very first printing of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). That edition of the book is preserved in the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, available for on-line viewing with extraordinarily high quality scans.

“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an innovative book not least because of the twenty four full color plates and myriad monochromatic illustrations in which the color changed according to the location in the story (Kansas = grey, Emerald City = green and so on). With the illustrative vignettes often encroaching on the text area, the type was cleverly printed over the top of the colored images” (BiblioOdyssey).

Without further ado, here are the official colors of this beloved classic.