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The big winner of the night? Rose Hall’s dress, inspired by Fahrenheit 451. Note the burning pages on the skirt. What did she win? Tickets to The Nutcracker. “I’ve never won anything before,” Hall said. “It’s kind of awesome. My mom would be proud of me.”

Look at me I’m standing on a boat: Ashley Mitchell, Katie Cagle, and Kate O’Donnell interpreted the title of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. (We’ll say nothing of the dog.) They won the made-up prize for “Best Foreign Novel.”

Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was the theme of Lisa Mae Osborn’s costume. She spent three hours with a hot glue gun putting it together. Most impressive: her winder actually worked.

During the show, ballgoers could peruse Gallery Homeland and its current exhibit: The Sword of Light, by Josh Arseneau.

Sportswriter Dwight Jaynes and his wife, Kimberlee, model as “Book Club” and “My Life Is an Open Book” respectively. “[The IPRC] is a great thing for our city,” Dwight Jaynes said. “Everyone would be proud of it, if they only knew about it.”

Diana Woolsey shows off her skirt, which was inscribed with a story she wrote specifically for event.

A detail of the “story skirt,” which included, Woolsey said, clichés about a bank robbery and an ensuing chase across state lines.

Heather Mahrry came as “Words, words, words,” the response Hamlet gives to Polonius when questioned about what he was reading. Lines from the scene are written on Mahrry’s dress.

Squeeze-box artist Justin Franzino pumped out the hits all night long.

Competitors walked down this pieced-together runway, made from children’s poetry about poultry and pages taken from a textbook about Panama.

Todd Mignola and Amy Dubin went period as Pip from Great Expectations and Madame Bovary. “I had the coat, so I just had to pick a character,” Mignola said. “I like the sound of ‘Pip.’”

Adina Lepp came as Michelle Tea, the San Francisco–based author of such titles as Rent Girl and Valencia. Tea performed a day later to close out Wordstock. Note Lepp’s tattoo of the I-5 corridor as it runs through Portland.

Rebecca Davison arrived as Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road, represented by a vintage dress and a few yellow pieces of fabric. “I’ll probably use it for Halloween, too,” she said.

One of the most inspired costumes of the night was Lisa Pate’s Tao of Pooh. How did she pull of the pooh? “Tootsie Rolls in a diaper,” she confessed. As horrible as that sounds, it looked even worse.

After all was said and done, this year’s Text Ball made over $2,500 for IPRC programs. “It was the best Text Ball we’ve had,” said Justin Hocking, the IPRC’s executive director.