The master of knotted string

There are plenty of books full of Heath Robinson's wonderfully complicated machines designed to do very little but this book is unique because it only features his advertising work. What makes it  special is because so much of the art produced for commercial concerns had a rather limited life. Now through Geoffrey Beare's careful research we can all enjoy seeing how Robinson created a walking dragline for Ruston-Bucyrus Limited in 1938 or how to take a flashlight of the Christmas dinner party for Wellington Films 1925.

In Beare's illustrated introduction I was intrigued to read that Robinson's work was very popular in America, his books and cartoons were published in Life (the humour title that ceased in 1936) and other magazines in the first decades of the last century (unfortunately from about 1928 artist Rube Goldberg, an American version of Robinson, became much more popular in print). It would seem obvious that companies would use Robinson's art, his drawings were very popular and who could not resist looking at an ad with a complicated bit of machinery set in a background full of quirky detail. In the back pages there's an alphabetical listing of over a hundred companies whose work is featured, many of them well known names today, for example: Bassetts; Bovis; Coleman's mustard; Hovis; Nabisco; Oxo; Johnnie Walker.

Robinson's work gets a good showing throughout the pages, black and white for newspaper ads or black on light coloured panels where the original was a booklet. Some of the colour examples are a treat to look at, page sixty-seven has a painting of a biscuit making machine printed on card and put in tins of Crawford's biscuits or five pages of the Brain Waves calendar art for Nottingham printer Thomas Foreman. Nearly all pictures have the Robinson trademarks of the knotted string or rope and paunchy men cycling to provide power for some whimsical machinery.

The book is beautifully designed with 286 illustrations (61 in colour) in a straightforward but elegant layout, all the ad art is catalogued by company and there is a comprehensive index. This is a celebration of a very British artist and his amazing inventions.