Mr. Quibble’s Costume Shop Trivia

Writing the poem

• Many last names were considered for the costume shop owner, including Bongo, Dibble, Mombo, Morty, Wibble, and Quackle. The goal was for the name to sound fun and quirky and for the word itself to sound bouncy.
• For placement of each line within the poem, consideration was given to the ordering of the costumes as they appear in the illustration, the pattern of boys and girls, the flow of the poem, and the order of the words “a” and “some.”
• The cowgirl, diver, and joker playing card costumes were planned to accommodate the tongue twisters that refer to them (“red-lettered yellow leather boots,” “well-worn rubber wristwatch,” and “frilly floral fabric”).
• The gnome, gondolier, treehouse, barbershop singer, and inventor were initially costume ideas and the tongue twisters were written to fit them.
• The barbershop singer was written in due to the author’s love of barbershop music.
• The “red-lettered yellow leather boots” phrase inspired the entire poem and was based on a choral diction exercise of “red letter, yellow leather, blue.”
• It took about 3.5 months to write the story, though the first two months overlapped with the completion of “A Shocking Scene at Shirring.”
• Some additional tongue twisters that were considered are: “a really lovely river lily” (rejected for having two excess syllables that seemed essential to the phrase), “a crazy, clanging cowbell” (originally intended for a cow costume, though the tongue twister was deemed too easy), and “some great grey glassy goggles” (replaced by “a great gold gladiolus” to cover the treehouse costume).

Illustrating the story

• The costumes were originally intended to be normal, more timeless costumes (e.g. firefighter, robot, pirate, etc.) with only one oddity, but it quickly escalated to mostly unusual or intricately designed ones.
• Each costume item was intended not only to make for a good tongue twister but also to not give away the costume, so the items are basically accessories and props.
• Selection of the costume items was somewhat based on having a fairly even distribution over the parts of the body where the item is worn.
• The joker playing card was inspired by a costume of a soccer player card.
• The treehouse costume was designed to fulfill the goal of having a costume that was larger at the top than the bottom (for the sake of filling out the illustration).
• The buckle costume was originally going to be a pirate but was swapped for a gnome to make it more obscure.
• The inventor idea resulted from the goal of incorporating a wheelchair where the real wheels were not costume wheels (i.e. the wheelchair could not be a vehicle where the wheels were simply decorated as the vehicle’s wheels). Some options considered for the wheels were logs (lumberjack), drums (drummer), scoops of ice cream (sundae), and honeycomb (something bee-related).
• Other costume ideas included an organ grinder monkey, a hot air balloon, a bird bath, and buildings (like the Leaning Tower of Pisa or Big Ben).
• The plague doctor mask in the headwear display was inspired by the illustrator’s own costume.