A well produced collection and examination of Heath Robinson’s works

• Presents an unconventional history of the world in which technology and its social setting get equal billing.

• Set in context by Adam Hart-Davis, popular TV presenter, avid fan of Heath Robinson and full of stories that lie behind the pictures.

• Unlike previous collections with minimal text, Very Heath Robinson explains the technical and social background.

• Over 200 illustrations and artefacts, including many published for the first time.

• Comes with an augmented reality app to interact with some of the most detailed images in 3D.‘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.