"I have been ill and frightfully bored and the one thing I have wanted
is a big album of your absurd beautiful drawings to turn over. You give
me a peculiar pleasure of the mind like nothing else in the world." --H.
G. Wells to W. Heath Robinson (1914)
This book takes a nostalgic look back to the imaginative and often
frivolous world of William Heath Robinson, one of the few artists to
have given his name to the English language. According to the Oxford
English Dictionary, the expression Heath Robinson is used to describe
"any absurdly ingenious and impracticable device of the kind illustrated
by this artist." Yet his elaborate drawings of contraptions are not the
only thing to make this book very Heath Robinson. Full of quirky images
from Romans wearing polka dots to balding men seducing mermaids, Very
Heath Robinson presents an unconventional history of the world in which
technology and its social setting get equal billing. William Heath
Robinson started out as a landscape artist and book illustrator, but
later turned his hand to drawing humorous illustrations for magazines
such as the Sketch and Tatler. His drawings were reproduced
worldwide and with his fame came new clients. Companies such as
Burberry, Johnnie Walker, and General Electric sought out Heath Robinson
to promote their products using his cartoon-style humor. Adam Hart-Davis
is the perfect person to set the artist's mechanical fantasies in
context, to explain the technological and social background and to laugh
along with the jokes. Known for his popular television series What the
Romans Did for Us and other programs on the history of science and
engineering, he is an avid fan of Heath Robinson and full of stories
that lie behind the pictures. He tells how an asthmatic janitor from
Ohio invented the vacuum cleaner, how Edwardian etiquette required you
to convey peas to your mouth on the back of your fork and how you might
do without servants in the Great Depression, thanks to early washing
machines, dishwashers, and labor-saving devices of the kind that set
Heath Robinson's pulse racing. A dozen collections of Heath Robinson's
work have been published over the last 80 years, starting in his
lifetime, but most have been compilations of pictures with minimal text.
Very Heath Robinson is the first to explain the technical and social
background out of which the pictures grew and to weave art and history
into a connected story. It portrays Heath Robinson as the visionary he
was, foreseeing technical advances decades before they occurred and
commenting wryly on urban issues such as traffic jams, litter, and flat
living that regularly niggle us today. Generously laid out in a large
art-book format, the book contains more than 200 Heath Robinson
illustrations, including many published here for the first time, as well
as photographs of Heath Robinson-designed book covers, postcards,
Christmas cards, leaflets, biscuit tins, and murals. With the book comes
an augmented reality app so you can interact with some of the most
detailed illustrations in 3D.
