The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

I cannot remember which came first for me, viewing the 1939 film or reading the book itself. I have always had a copy of this book, ever since I can remember. I still have that copy, a little worse for wear, but still filled with the magic and amazing details that the film does not even begin to explore.
My childhood copy is hardback, bound in white with glorious color reproductions of Denslow's illustrations. Huge poppy flowers hover over Dorothy, as if they were ready to engulf her, Toto skips blissfully beside her. Dorothy does not look like Judy Garland at all, she is short and stout with enormous braids framing her Gibson girl face. She is doll like in her appearance, clearly just a young girl, "fresh from the farm". On the back cover, the Cowardly Lion is brushing tears away from his eyes with his tail, a huge poppy poised to engulf him also.
The book is filled with distinct details about Oz that the movie never even tries to explain. Glinda the Good Witch is not drowning a pink spun sugar gown, giggling away, rather, she is a stern but kind madonna, tall, stately, and empowered by her true love for her country and people. Oz isn't simply a place with a yellow brick road leading to a glorious city, it is a complex world divided into quadrants, all answerable to the emerald city and the ruling wizard, but each its own county with laws and leaders and rules to be followed (or ignored at your own peril). Glinda was in charge of the red quadrant, Quadling land. The Munchkins, or Munchkin land was blue, and ruled by the Wicked Witch of the East (crushed by Dorothy's house) and mourned by the Wicked Witch of the West. Glinda was more powerful than either of these evil sisters...but she really steps into being in other Oz books.
The ruby slippers were never ruby in the books. They became ruby for the technicolor film, but in the book they were always silver. I always found it annoying that the shoes in the story were not the beautiful and sparkly ruby red, but a dull pewter silver. The most important aspect of the shoes were that they took Dorothy home to Kansas, when she was ready to return. They protected her feet as she ran over the burning sands of the desert that surrounded the Land of Oz, and kept the rest of us out. The slippers slipped off her feet as she reached the deserts end...she never got to return to Kansas with anything from Oz, other than her memories.
Dorothy did have to discover herself and her friends while walking the yellow brick road to Oz. In some sections of the narrative, the road disappeared or faded into the county she was walking in, but she doggedly followed it to the Emerald City, looking for her return ticket.
I read the book frequently, as the story always enthralled me, but I was blessed to have my own collection of the other Oz books, that not everybody was aware existed. My great aunts and grandfather had read the books as children, and my great grandmother kept the volumes upstairs in "the girl's room" even though the girls were ancient by the time I was reading! I read every single copy of the 13 other tales, even when the books began to fall apart in my hands from wear. I loved them all, as they expanded and delighted my personal vision of Oz, introducing me to more and more fantastic and outrageous characters.
Dorothy morphed from a simple, dumpy, braided country girl to a snappy bobbed flapper child in a white sailor suit, with such snap and spunk that I truly wanted to be her for a while, just to have the freedom to explore that she embodied.
I am eternally grateful that someone named Frank L. Baum felt that American readers needed fairy tales of their own, and wrote 14 books filled with his imaginative stories.
There is no place like home, except for Oz...and I wanna go to Oz!