The 11 books shown in the gallery are something of an oddity (see left) - with one foot in the past and one in the future - and if you're a collector, you wouldn't want to overlook them or muddle them up with the original editions.

At the start of the 1970s, just a few years after first being issued, Ladybird decided to re-illustrate 11 of the 36 books in the Key Word Reader scheme.  Why just these 11 books?  Well it's not clear, but presumably it was felt that artwork in these titles looked particularly dated, or perhaps parents and teachers had complained about the accuracy, safety or stereotyping of particular pictures.  For whatever reason these 11 books were completely re-illustrated by Martin Aitchison or Harry Wingfield. 

However, the traditional 1960s format of the original series was retained, with a full page of text on the left and a full-page illustration on the right.  So unless you are very familiar with the artwork, it can be hard to spot whether these books are the original 1960s editions or a 'first revision' book, dating from the early 1970s.

A few years later in the mid-1970s Ladybird Books decided to re-package the whole reading scheme.  All the remaining books were re-illustrated (still by Aitchison or Wingfield) and the traditional cover style, a full-page illustration, was changed permanently to a small picture centred on the cover.  All the books that were re-illustrated at this time were done in a much lighter style and the text and pictures no longer favoured the traditional Ladybird approach, but were  distributed across the page.  Peter and Jane were put into jeans and t-shirts, given a tad more 'street-cred' and then left alone for the next thirty years.  If you go into a bookshop today, the Key Word Readers you may see on the shelves will still contain the mid-seventies artwork.

So these 11 books are something of an oddity - with one foot in the past and one in the future - and if you're a collector, you wouldn't want to overlook them or muddle them up with the original editions.