‘I really have a secret satisfaction in being considered rather mad.’ The name of William Heath Robinson has entered the national vocabulary as a by-word for eccentric inventions and makeshift solutions – and with good reason. His world of cogs, bits of string, magnets and precarious tipping points holds a universal appeal. The world of travel is lampooned and reinvented in this brilliantly funny collection of Heath Robinson cartoons. The railway system, cars, boats and planes are all given the unique Heath Robinson treatment, from cow-catching devices to homemade safety gliders, providing hilarious and impossible solutions to the travel problems we never even knew existed.

William Heath Robinson was an English cartoonist and illustrator best known for drawings of ridiculously complicated machines for achieving simple objectives, for which his name has become part of our national vocabulary. An illustrator and cartoonist, he wrote and illustrated children's books as well as lampooning the secret weapons being used during the First World War.