I decided to open the "Wizard of Oz" group page on Facebook and found 2,707,041 people following this group with 2,885,082 people likes.
Comparing this data with 2011 results when there were 538,945 Oz fans, shows that interest in Oz increase over five times in eight years.
In addition there are various groups dedicated to specific Oz fans on Facebook, such as International Wizard of Oz Club, Inc., Midwest Wizard of Oz Festival, Wizard Of Oz Collectors United!, Wizard of Oz 4 everybody!!!!, just to name a few.
In August 2019, I visited Wizard of Oz museum in Wamego, KS. It was a surprised to see so many people with kids on Wednesday at 2pm. I started to wonder how many visitors do they have annually and based on my research, I found that Oz museum attracts over 35,000 annually. This is great news, considering the museum located around 100 miles away from the closest big city (Kansas City). This statistics also reaffirms growing interest in Wizard of Oz.
Yes, these are the big numbers 2.7 millions of fans on Facebook and 35K Oz museum visitors, but how many of them are actually collectors?
My assumption is that out of all Oz collectors out there only 10% have the collection of valuable first edition books, 80% are collectors of other Wizard of Oz memorabilia such as figurines, dolls, ornaments, etc., and remaining 10% that have both books and other trinkets.
Since my main interest in the Wizard of Oz books and rare memorabilia, I would like to dwell into this topic.
Most of Oz books collectors with exception of a few that still trying to find Oz books by visiting book stores, are purchasing books online. A few main online sources are Ebay, Abebooks and a few specialty stores like mine that carry Oz books.
I recently found a reply comment below from a book collector to "where should I sell my books question"?
"Why don't you take them to a bookstore and sell them? What are you going to learn from ebay, the most unreliable marketplace, and abebooks, the second-most unreliable marketplace, if you have no tools or experience to know what is a valid price? "
Yes, Ebay is unreliable source for sure, but I do list some of my Oz books there also. Why I am selling there you might ask? My simple answer is to make aware and educate potential buyers about Oz books editions and value.
But there is more complex answer due to my curiosity. In addition to exposing some of my Oz books, I was planning to find out how many people interested in the first edition Oz books.
Two years ago I decided to list a full set of first edition Oz books with a few being in an original dust jackets by Reilly & Britton on ebay. I did not expected to sell this set on ebay since I listed for $150,000. In my opinion this set is worth that price since one book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” in “A” binding (first known copy dated from May 23, 1900 ) worth over $100,000 and books in dust jacket worth over $10,000 each.
Few people dream about having these books and a few are laughing about the price, but this is what I learn from this listing..
Since this listing initiated on Ebay, it has around 115,000 views. Assuming that this set is only shows on Ebay if someone searches for Wizard of Oz books, shows me that at least half of viewers found these books are interesting and worth to view. In addition over 900 people placed this listing into their watch list. This information indicates to me that there is at least 900 people who are in some form have an interest in first edition Oz books.
Since Ebay is the only one online source that evaluated by me, I assume combining other online sources will yield over 2000 Wizard of Oz books collectors. You can see image of the listing and statistics below.
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