It’s always interesting to see how beloved children’s products change over time, from Barbie’s wider hips to Thomas The Tank Engine’s marketing explosion. Mental Floss has an interesting look at one specific product—Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever—that’s actually fairly uplifting. Using Alan Taylor’s Flickr set, which documents two versions of the book—one from 1963 and one from 1991—the site examines how the book has become more P.C. over time, removing Native American headdresses from mice, adding a menorah and a Hanukkah mention to a page about holidays, and changing labels so that a “pretty stewardess” is now a “flight attendant” straight up.
The most recent edition of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever was published in 1999, meaning more interesting updates have probably been made since.