Here is a splendid treasury, the definitive volume of the comic fantasies of the great English artist William Heath Robinson, whose name passed into the English language during his lifetime. In America, we have the "Rube Goldberg devices;" in England, they call them "Heath Robinson contraptions." Robinson's elementary mechanical world is brilliant and arcane--those ancient wooden cogwheels, intricate pulleys, fragile gantries, ingenious tunnels, magnets, and steam kettles kept on boil by a lighted candle or two; the whole enterprise held together by knotted string and operated by intensely serious workmen with a sprinkling of soberly top-hatted company directors in charge. This distinguished volume of Robinson's dazzling genius covers the whole field of his comic work in peace and war, from his first mocking anti-German propaganda in the First World War down to the Second, during which he died. Turning these delightful pages, one has exactly the feeling of H.G. Wells, who wrote to Heath Robinson in 1914: "Your absurd, beautiful drawings . . . give me a peculiar pleasure of the mind like nothing else in the world." Robinson's world will enchant everyone and for all time--so long as machines remain machines and human beings need reminding that that is all they are.