'I was fairly launched on my career as a humorous artist,' said William Heath Robinson in his autobiography, of editor Bruce Ingram's decision to publish his drawings in The Sketch magazine in 1906.

As one of the titles forming part of the Illustrated London News archive housed and managed here at the library, The Sketch is a particularly rich source for Heath Robinson illustrations, as is The Bystander, which published hundreds of Heath Robinson cartoons in the inter-war years, The Strand and The Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic News. That first series in The Sketch, 'The Gentle Art of Catching Things' hinted at the oeuvre in which Heath Robinson would earn the moniker, 'the Gadget King' and become a household name as his endless stream of crackpot inventions, contraptions and silly ideas tackled all kinds of everyday problems from eating peas to pressing trousers or attempting home tooth extraction. It was a wry, self-deprecating and very British type of humour that captured the imagination of the public who would eventually use the term, 'It's a bit Heath Robinson' to describe anything rickety and homespun, with dubious efficacy.

And yet our extensive collection of Heath Robinson's illustrations proves that not only was he a master of the mechanically absurd, but a versatile artist of varied talents. Born in North London into a family of commercial illustrators and engravers (his father was chief artist for the Penny Illustrated Paper), Will had initially hoped to be a landscape artist, studying at the Royal Academy in the 1890s. Financial necessity eventually caused him to turn to book illustration in which his elder brothers Tom and Charles were already making a good living and our collection of 'golden age of illustration' editions here at the library include many examples illustrated by all three Robinson brothers from the 1890s up to the First World War, while Christmas colour supplements such as Holly Leaves, regularly include lush watercolours by Will which are a reminder of his early ambitions.

But it is for those convoluted contraptions he is best known. Spanning a timeline of the twentieth century, Heath Robinson offered a helpful solution for everybody and every occasion, from hapless Tommies in the trenches of the First World War to families looking to eke out rations in the next. He even suggested ways to excavate the Channel Tunnel in 1919 - 75 years before it became a reality. Heath Robinson died in 1944 but despite this and the fact that some of his cartoons are now over one hundred years old, his mind-boggling gizmos and gadgetry continue to offer a cheerful metaphor for the complicated maze of modern day life. Here at the library, we feel a strong connection with Heath Robinson and can offer one of the widest collections of his work for licensing with over 800 images online, and many more in our off-line archive. Fancy a giggle? Click here to discover Heath Robinson's wacky world.