It was a grave yard smash

Last month, my son and I were at a library we don't usually go to. Small one, but the children's section had a great deal of recent picture books. George was not interested in these, he found a bin of Scooby Doo picture books and he was hooked but good. Which gave me time to look at the new ones. It was Halloween so I was happy to see all these lovely SPOOOOOKY books. One took my attention, it was a picture book of The Monster Mash. You know. The old silly novelty song. It was new and had lovely illustrations, the illustrator really did a great job. The artist is David Catrow and it really is fun and awesome, if only.....

On looking at it, I realized something was off. The cover and the spine and the title page all said the author of the book was David Catrow. It hit me. What about the guy who wrote the song back in the sixties? Where was his name. So I searched and finally found it in the copyright page in tiny print acknowledging that the song was written by Bobby Pickett. The guy who wrote the words to the picture book only gets credit in the copyright notice. I checked and all the words of the book, and the only words of the book, are the lyrics written by the almost uncredited Bobby Pickett.

And now comes the rant.

I want to believe that David Catrow had nothing to do with this. That his publisher said, people are buying this book for your pictures, you are the author. I hope that an artist who illustrated someone else's words would not think himself worthy of sole authorship of the work. I mean hell, even in most pictures book versions of The Night Before Christmas you get the author Clement Moore on the cover. So this song by Bobby Pickett is not his anymore? He was just a workman on a song from a half century ago and we don't need to even mention more than we have to legally? Catrow is our boy and that's the only name we need to float.

This pisses me off more than it should. Bobby Pickett wrote a silly song that is still being sung fifty years later. It's not like David Catrow rescued this obscure work from the vaults. Someone wrote it, and it wasn't the artist who made the cool pictures.

For years I wrote a column on GotPoetry.Com called the International Revue of Bad Children's Book. I ended it after 42 columns about three years ago. If I was still writing it, I would include this book, not because the words are bad and not because the pictures are lousy, they are certainly not. I would include it because it is showing the publishing world being disrespectful to a writer. Even if they think the words are silly and superfluous. There would not be a book if not for Bobby Pickett. Someone needs to write the words, and that person should have his name on the goddammed title page.