Heath Robinson's Home Front: How to Make Do and Mend in Style

Heath Robinson’s Home Front sees the well-loved cartoonist working in collaboration with the writer and humorist Cecil Hunt. Together, they offer hopelessly impractical solutions to some of the most perplexing problems of the day. Pity the poor Briton advised to play his weekly bridge tournament while wearing a gas mask, the gardener who substitutes a complex configuration of magnets in the shortage of simple pea-sticks, or the motorist who must find a way to power her vehicle without gasoline. The result is an amusingly idiosyncratic celebration of the British population’s remarkable ability to “make do and mend.”

Heath Robinson was a household name in Britain, and millions of readers around the world continue to thoroughly enjoy his cartoons today. A classic military-themed compendium, Heath Robinson’s Home Front will be a favorite with fans of the cartoonist’s complicated, fanciful contraptions.

W. Heath Robinson (1872–1944) was a British cartoonist. Trained in painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, he eventually became so well-known for the madcap contraptions that were the subject of cartoons in popular weeklies that a codebreaking device was named after him during WWII.

Cecil Hunt (1902–1954) was a writer and editor of more than sixty books. He was most famous for his books of “howlers,” which collected errors made by British schoolchildren in their written work.