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>>the LIE that Clement Moore is the author of A Visit from St. Nicholas

You know what killed us? When Don came out with his book in 2000, we had massive publicity - we had a two page spread in People Magazine and another two pages in the NY Times. There was a gentleman who had JUST bought a handwritten NBC poem and Don’s book plummeted its value. So he hired a paranormal investigator to tear us limb from limb. He caught Don on some sloppy points but, for the most part, the critique was just wrong.

When Mac contacted me years later to say he could PROVE it, the gentleman had finally gotten the value back of his paper and sold it, but he went after Mac tooth and nail. Now Mac is one of the foremost Shakespeare scholars and idolized in the anonymous text attribution community. An emeritus professor. The problem with Mac’s book was that he wrote it for his peers. I “suggested” some changes to make it more human being friendly and Mac stopped sending chapters. Sigh. So I put out MY book with Mac’s book turned into standard English. Got a great review on Amazon.

But I’m as straight-arrow as you’re going to come across. So when Wikipedia says don’t edit your own work, I don’t. I fear that’s not quite true of the “other side.” So Wikipedia is still a bit tilted, in my opinion.

As for new versions of the poem, I hear from authors who WANT to put Henry’s name on the poem but are stopped by their publishers. The thought is that enough people search for the poem by Moore’s name that it would cause a drop in their own sales. So they shrug apologetically to me, and leave both names off.

People Magazine
http://www.henrylivingston.com/xmas/publicity/images/people2000.htm

NY Times
http://www.henrylivingston.com/xmas/publicity/images/nytimes2000.htm

The full website, 15,000 pages, is:
http://www.henrylivingston.com

Mac’s proofs are in:
http://www.henrylivingston.com/data

I transcribed the entire body of work of Moore and Livingston into phoneme pairs - the last sound of one word and the first sound of the next - and husband used the computer, following Mac’s guidance, to find the favorite sounds each poet preferred unconsciously. Then we found them for NBC. It was statistically right in the middle of Henry’s and completely outside Moore’s.

But, really, all it takes to know the truth is to try to read Moore’s horrible poetry.