Tik-Tok of Oz

Tik-Tok of Oz is the eighth book in L. Frank Baum's Oz series, published on June 19, 1914. Despite its title, the mechanical man Tik-Tok plays a small role; the real focus is the quest of the Shaggy Man, introduced in The Road to Oz, to rescue his brother, who vanished while digging underground in Colorado. The novel grew out of Baum's stage version, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, staged in Los Angeles in spring 1913, from which Baum drew much of his material.

The story follows Queen Ann Soforth of Oogaboo, who gathers an army to conquer Oz, and Betsy Bobbin and her mule Hank, who are washed ashore and end up in a greenhouse belonging to the Rose Kingdom. There the Shaggy Man rescues them with his Love Magnet, and the group sets out with the Rose Princess Ozga and Polychrome toward the underground realm of the Nome King. To discourage them, the Nome King sends them through the Rubber Country and then down the Hollow Tube, but the immortal Great Jinjin sends the lazy dragon Quox against him, and the Nome King loses his magic and is driven from his kingdom. The Shaggy Man's brother is finally freed from a spell of ugliness.

The book has continuity errors with earlier volumes, such as the way the Love Magnet works. It was produced more modestly than its predecessors, and its first edition sold a little over fourteen thousand copies, a respectable figure but below that of The Patchwork Girl of Oz the year before, as Baum faced cheap reprints of his early works. It also contained the first printed map of Oz, which proved very popular, although it was drawn with its regions reversed.