Distributed Proofreaders is proud to celebrate its 32,000th title, Tik-Tok of Oz — many thanks to all the volunteers who worked on it!
The Wonderful Volumes of Oz – We’re off to see the Wizard!
Who among us has NOT seen the classic fairy tale The Wizard of Oz on television? Ah, but have you READ the original and the other volumes in the series?? Thanks to Distributed Proofreaders, there is no excuse!!
All of the volumes written by L. (Lyman) Frank Baum have been processed at DP. All are available on Project Gutenberg as text-only versions; but most, like our 32,000th title, have been redone with all of the original illustrations!
The volume Tik-Tok of Oz is the latest to complete the journey through DP. Many of the characters from previous volumes make a reappearance, including Glinda, the Cowardly Lion, Betsy Bobbin, the Shaggy Man, Hank (the mule), Ozga and Polychrome, Dorothy, and Toto (too!). Tik-Tok, Queen Ann Soforth, Nome King, and Tittiti-Hoochoo are some of the new characters introduced in this volume.
Queen Ann Soforth of Oogaboo sets out to raise an army to conquer the Nome King. Betsy, Tik-Tok (a mechanical man who is guaranteed to work perfectly for a thousand years), Shaggy Man (with his Love Magnet), and a number of other characters team up with Queen Ann’ s “noble army” and save Oz!
I’ll confess that I have so far read only a few of the Oz tales. So, most of the characters are new to me. This is one of the best reasons to participate in activities such as Distributed Proofreaders—you may discover new treasures which were beloved a hundred years ago and still resonate today.
Although one person takes on the responsibility to transform a text file into a readable text version and an HTML version with coding to produce mobile versions (epub and mobi), each project requires quite a few folks to produce images, and to check the spelling, punctuation, and formatting. Tik-Tok took more than 60 DP volunteers to reach the post-processing stage. See this article for more on the DP process.
Now that I have completed this volume (I’ve read and helped produce the next in the series, The Scarecrow of Oz), I am looking forward to “catching up” on the others! Oh, by the way, did you know ALL of the animals CAN talk in Oz? Read Tik-Tok to hear what Toto has to say!
This post was contributed by Tom Cosmas, a DP volunteer who post-processed this project.
Hot off the Press 
What a nice choice for the 32,000th title and an interesting BLOG post! Thanks.
Congratulations on completing 32,000 books!
Yes, I agree they picked a good title for the 32,000th volume and I was lucky enough to have volunteered to work on it. Thanks for your kind words..
Well done all involved. Thank you for the lovely summary.
What a fun book to choose for the 32,000th title! Nice blog post, and congrats to all who worked on this book. I’ll let my Oz-loving friends know, and I might even take a peek myself. (I never read the Oz books, but I own The Gobbly Wobblyn, which was another book written at about the same time, in competition to the Oz books.)
Thanks, Tom, for a very nice article. I don’t remember if the version I saw of The Wizard was seen in a cinema theater or on TV; it was in color and we didn’t have color TV until after the children were grown and we’ve never had good TV reception. I’m pretty sure I’d read it as a child (before TV).
Mama Beth
[…] titles. Just five months later, in May 2016, DP posted its 32,000th title, Tik-Tok of Oz. See the blog post on this milestone for more on this and other books in the beloved Oz series that DP has contributed to […]
[…] Edith Van Dyne, a pseudonym for L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz series (one of which was DP’s 32,000th title); and Radio Man, by Ralph Milne Farley, a pseudonym for Roger Sherman Hoar, a Massachusetts state […]
Me fascinó tu página web: https://blog.pgdp.net/2016/05/28/celebrating-32000-titles/. Definitivamente pienso
que el futuro de los libros son páginas como esta, no crees?
[…] most, like our 32,000th title, have been redone with all of the original illustrations! See this blog post for more on this […]