When I got home from work one day last week, I saw that two-year-old F had been reading/perusing/gnawing on our old-school copy of Hooper Humperdink? Not Him! Ours is the version illustrated by Charles E. Martin, not the newly published version redone by Scott Nash.

Re-illustrations are nothing new. Loren Long recently took on The Little Engine That Could, leaving the text — with its cries for this and cries for that — untouched. A few years back, Marc Simont redid Louis Slobodkin’s Caldecott-winning illustrations for James Thurber’s Many Moons. And there have been so many illustrators of Sid Fleischman‘s McBroom books (Quentin Blake and Walter Lorraine among them) that I’ve lost track of who originally illustrated them.

So, here’s my question: Has there ever been a children’s book whose text was replaced while the original illustrations were preserved? Should there have been?