Ant and Bee are back!

When I was a little girl I loved the Ant & Bee books, by Angela Banner, so when I had children of my own and hence a cast iron excuse to buy lots more children's books (I've been buying them all my life anyway, but having real live children in the house makes it seem more legit, somehow) I searched high and low for them, only to discover that they were out of print, and second-hand copies were changing hands for sometimes over £100 on Amazon. So imagine my delight when on the counter of my local bookshop this morning I found these:

Yes - they've seen the light and reprinted them!

The funny thing is, although I remembered that some of the words were red and some were black, I never noticed when I was a child, that they take you through the ABC in each story (doh!). So in "More Ant and Bee" (they'd obviously sold out of the first in the series already, so I've had to start with More...) the story is that Ant and Bee want to go to Asia, so they find a boat, and then hide in the pocket of a man's coat etc etc.

The idea is that the child read the red words, and the adult (or an older sibling) fills in the black ones. This may indeed be how my parents introduced them to me as a child, but I remember very clearly reading them to myself long after I'd learnt to read confidently. Kind Dog was my favourite character, though he doesn't appear in all of the stories. I'm so excited to find them again!

Did you have any favourite childhood books that are now out of print? Or have you found old favourites recently, and read them very differently? Do tell!