Title: SOME 'FRIGHTFUL' WAR PICTURES
Publisher: Duckworth & Co, London
Publication Date: 1915
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
Edition: 1st
Unpaginated [50] printed pages. Illustrated with 24 full-page half-tone plates, with captions and a small black & white silhouette on the proceeding pages. Endpapers have double-page silhouette illustrations of "Lighting Back" (an exploding artillery gun) and "The Free Lance" (a shrapnel-ridden German Monoplane). Some very light finger marks to page margins. Front hinge cracked but still very firm. 25 x 37.5 cm. Original printed decorative paper covered boards. Publisher's red cloth spine, very slightly worn at head and tail and with a few minor horizontal creases. Upper board with red and black caricature of grenade juggling German officer within black lettering. Rear cover withred and black caricature of German soldier lying on his back and artillery shell heading down towards him. Corners, edges and rear board very slightly worn. Front board with short horizontal thin broken line of white paint- not especially noticeable. William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) was an English cartoonist and illustrator best known for drawings of ridiculously complicated machines for achieving simple objectives. Best known for his hilarious drawings of zany contraptions. The phrase "Heath Robinson contraption" entered the "Oxford English Dictionary" in 1917. Starting out as a student of the Royal Academy Schools (1892-5), he quickly turned to the lucrative field of book illustration and developed his forte in satirical drawings and cartoons. Heath Robinson drew many cartoons lampooning the excesses of the First World War and poking fun at the German army, bringing welcome comic relief to British soldiers and civilians. This is the first of four anti-German cartoon collections. The others being "Hunlikely!" (1916), "The Saintly Hun: A Book of German Virtues" (1917) and "Flypapers" (1919). Bookseller Inventory # 4272