Trivia / Magic Shop

• Development Hell: "The Vampire's Tooth", an unfinished book in the series, has been mentioned via Coville's guestbook on his official site.
• What Could Have Been: Coville has mentioned in author's notes that when he was first working on the series, one of his ideas was for an anthology called Tales from the Magic Shop. This was scrapped when the individual stories kept growing to book-length.
  • The original draft of "Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher" was titled "The Dragon's Egg", and at one point the draft ended with Jeremy saying goodbye to a dog-sized Tiamat (there were no night flights in that version) outside Mr. Elives' shop instead of seeing her leaving.
  • According to the Author's Note in the book itself, Coville's original draft of Jennifer Murdley's Toad ended after about forty pages with the kids looking out Jennifer's window and seeing a giant toad "the size of a Volkswagen". Then he wrote an outline for the rest of the story which included "Mr. Elives getting kidnapped, a planet full of toads, and a lizard who made too many puns". After sending it to several editors who all loved Bufo but hated the outline, he set it aside for a while until his friend Jane Yolen read it and, knowing he could fix the ending, gave him a contract to write the book. After looking back at things, he wound up rewriting it into its current form.