October 3, 1916

James Herriot is a well-known pseudonym for the Yorkshire veterinarian, "Alf" Wight, (October 3, 1916 to February 23, 1995). So well known is he that we will not even list the American titles of his books, merely their original British names, in an attempt to present perhaps more interesting facts.

If Only They Could Talk (1970)
It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet (1972)
Let Sleeping Vets Lie (1973)
Vet in Harness (1974)
Vets Might Fly (1976)
Vet in a Spin (1977)
The Lord God Made Them All (1981)
Every Living Thing (1992)

Naturally cats figure in these books. Most of the cat books though, are excerpts or expansions of his original stories. Nothing the matter with that. I refer to books like--

Moses the Kitten (1999)
The Christmas Day Kitten (1993)
Oscar, Cat-About-Town (1993).

In fact, the volume, James Herriot's Cat Stories (1994) prompted his son, to later write about the process in these words:

This book was like the earlier James Herriot's Dog Stories in that it contained chapters taken from all his previous books, but otherwise it was very different. For a start it was a small book, and very short. The reason for this was simple -- Alf had not written many stories about cats. Jenny Dereham at Michael Joseph [the publisher] read through the first seven books and found only five or six stories which would be suitable; the rest, she said, had a tendency to be about splattered cats arriving on the operating table after being hit by cars. Since the stories were to be illustrated throughout in colour, these were not very suitable. When she heard that "Alf" was writing one more book, Every Living Thing, she asked if he could possibly write some 'nice' cat stories, which could go into the later compilation. Alf, as always, helpfully agreed. 

The above  is a quote from The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father (1999) by James Wight, also a veterinarian, now.

- - ‎