Simultaneously mute, familiar and remote, the images on these pages could be drawn from pretty much anywhere across the spectrum of contemporary art. A car waits in the darkened entrance of an underground car park; an impassive scientist studies the readings on a pressure gauge; happy children greet their parents; a poised ballerina extends her foot, her expression frozen.  You can find their like in the claustrophobic portraiture of Sam Taylor-Wood, or the enigmatic Englishness of Martin Parr's photography. But these paintings were made nearly 40 years ago, and are images of another time and place used to illustrate the Ladybird series of children's books.  Produced between the early 1960s and the early 1970s, the Ladybird series of learn-to-read books was conceived by headteacher and author William Murray as a means of assisting pre-school and primary school literacy.  A certain amount of educational science went into their conception, and the idea behind the drawings was outlined in a preface for parents and teachers: "The full-colour illustrations have been designed to create a desirable attitude towards learning - by making every child eager to read each title. Thus, this attractive reading scheme embraces not only the latest findings in word frequency, but also the natural interests and activities of happy children."  The series was illustrated by the artists John Berry and Martin Aitchison, and depicted a postwar world of order and prosperity, at once idyllic and hierarchical - a place of safety. Over the years, there was a gradual move away from the largely bourgeois idyll of Tudorbethan suburban life towards a world more recognisably modern. Many of the titles were slightly reworded and redrawn to keep pace with the changing times.  Their subject matter was as ordered as the individual paintings themselves: a whole set of books called People At Work, for example, and another, Public Services. Then there were simple stories of domestic routine - of shopping in a sunny high street, where kindly, silver-haired shopkeepers wrapped everything in brown paper, and Mummy wore gloves.  Aitchison, who is now 84, illustrated around 70 Ladybird titles. He studied at the Birmingham School of Art between 1935 and 1940, then briefly at the Slade. At art school, he says, he didn't visualise being anything but a painter. "After the war, my attitude changed, and I began illustration and advertising as a freelancer."  Berry also had a formal art background, studying at the Royal Academy in the 1930s. His speciality was portraiture: he painted, among many others, Lady Astor and her daughters, the young Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, and, twice, the late Diana, Princess of Wales. More recently, he is known in America for a portrait of George W Bush.  In the work of both Berry and Aitchison, the class structure is still clearly in place - then undergoes drastic revision throughout the 1960s as a multicultural, urban experience came into being. In the 1950s, Aitchison illustrated Luck Of The Legion, a story about the Foreign Legion for the hugely popular Eagle boys' comic.  "In 1962, I approached Ladybird books," he says, "who at that time were in the early stages of launching the Reading Scheme, which eventually increased their standing in the publishing world, selling more than 80 million copies. The idea was to have illustrations of near photographic realism, and the three original artists were Harry Wingfield, John Berry and myself. Harry had been doing this kind of work before, John could do anything, provided he had a photograph to work from, but for me, coming from so masculine a world as the Legion, the little children were a severe test. However, I persevered."  As tools for literacy, the Ladybird books - like the fiction of their predecessor, Enid Blyton - were hugely popular but subject to some controversy. "Our books were heavily criticised by the children's critics of the time for their unfashionable lack of imagination and their laboured techniques," says Aitchison.  "But, while not necessarily arguing with that, I feel that we, perhaps unwittingly, did build a record of middle-class childhood of the period. My general impression, from those adults I know who had the Reading Scheme as children, is that they were very happy with it - but it was only a start to literacy, based on the notion that 300 certain words formed the bulk of our speech."  Far from finding the books "laboured" or "unimaginative", children themselves responded to them and were drawn into their world. For children born between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Berry and Aitchison's illustrations for Ladybird have become as much a shared feature of childhood as the "historical figures" series of Airfix kits or the presenters on Blue Peter.  Seen today as artisan products of popular culture, these illustrations combine the pleasures of nostalgia with visual immediacy - a winning combination for a generation of artists and collectors brought up on the instant impact of album sleeves and advertising.  Ladybird illustrations are now collected by such young British art stars as Gavin Turk and Fiona Banner, while a substantial exhibition of Berry and Aitchison's work for Ladybird goes on show at the Simon Finch gallery in London next week.  Paul Stolper, art dealer and co-organiser of the exhibition, is particularly well placed to identify the connections between 1960s popular culture and the rhetoric of contemporary art. In addition to representing work by Peter Saville, the designer behind iconic album covers for Roxy Music and Joy Division, he is joint owner of the Stolper/Wilson collection of punk artefacts - clothes, posters, original artwork by Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid.  "I'm particularly interested in art that pre-exists in other areas," says Stolper, "which if you embrace and bring into the art world, you allow people to look at in a different way. Technically, the Ladybird illustrations are interesting because of the way they're based on photography. I knew that if you took their texts away, the illustrations would seem both strange and very familiar. I can put them on the wall and people are absolutely confused as to whether or not they're the work of a young contemporary artist who is simply appropriating the style of the Ladybird illustration. But I am not interested in trying to imbue the work with any contemporary conceptual trickery to give it some kind of kudos; it's enough to say they're Ladybird paintings - that's the beauty in them, and it would be unfair to Martin and John to try to take anything away from what they've done."  In our postmodern, ironic world, it would be all too easy to see Berry and Aitchison's work as just a form of elevated kitsch. But with prices starting somewhere in the region of £1,500 per illustration, and the affection and interest they command among contemporary viewers, there would seem to be a far more committed relationship between these images and their latest public.  "I just wanted to show them because I remembered them so clearly from when I was a child," says Laurence Johns, the exhibition's co-organiser. "When we were kids, we thought that we'd all have jobs like the ones in the Ladybird books - a policeman with a torch, a fireman ... It just didn't work out like that. They showed all the old British industries, too. What would they do now? They'd have to have a picture of some call centre in Asia."  The appeal of these illustrations to a contemporary audience, and to new collectors, lies in their ability to enfold the viewer in their world - a slower, kinder place. "I am flattered, of course," says Aitchison, "at the same time as being made to feel antique."  · Another Time, Another Place, an exhibition of John Berry and Martin Aitchison's Ladybird paintings, is at Simon Finch Art, 319 Portobello Road, London W10, from March 5-April 3. Details: 020-8962 8620.
Remember learning to read back in the 1960s? Remember Ladybird books and that cosy, middle-class idyll in which Mummy wore gloves and Daddy had a good, honest job? Forty years on, reports Michael Bracewell, those romanticised images are enjoying a renaissance.