How to Be a Motorist by Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne

Humor can often date oddly - what one generation thinks is screamingly funny can fall flat with their children. Or worse, the cultural references shift or disappear, so the kids or grandkids are left wondering what was supposed to be funny.

Heath Robinson was a British illustrator and cartoonist in the first half of the twentieth century, specializing in over-complicated contraptions and odd combinations of items to do everyday things. (My understanding is that he had a solid career before that, and fell into the overcomplication line during The Great War, but I could easily be wrong.) At one point, the comparison was that Robinson was to UK illustration what Rube Goldberg was to US illustration - though I think both of them are half-forgotten these days, another two generations on.

So Robinson did a lot of illustrations and drawings, for magazines, for newspapers, probably for other outlets. They piled up, and fell into categories at least some of the time. Someone, possibly Robinson himself, thought it would be a jolly good thing to gather up those drawings and put them into a form people could continue to buy, so they could make him some more money.

And so there was a series of at least four short humorous "How to" books, with Robinson illustrations surrounded by new text by K.R.G. Browne. One of them was 1939's How to Be a Motorist, and I found a copy of that cheap recently, and read the thing.

It's a time capsule, necessarily. It's about the automobiles of 1939, which are somewhat different from those of eighty-five years later, and about the roads and rules of 1939 Britain, which are also somewhat different from the roads and rules near me, and are probably pretty different even from contemporary Britain. Browne says repeatedly that cars are more dependable and less dependent on the specialized knowledge of their operators than they used to be, which is true as far as it goes, but it went a lot father after that.

This is a book that very clearly started as a stack of drawings, which was organized into a sequence by Robinson or Browne or both, and then Browne wrote words to connect them all into a generally coherent narrative. It's also got a slightly musty tone to it, with Browne repeatedly referring to "my friend Mr. Heath Robinson" as if we might have forgotten why we bought the book. (It's always "Mr. Heath Robinson," too - stiff upper lip and all that.)

I was happy to find that it was still amusing, and that the problems of 1939 motoring are not vastly different - at least in exaggerated parody form - from those of today. Browne is working in a slightly stiffer mode than I'd prefer, but he was a British guy born in 1895, so one has to make allowances. This is a light silly book, just as much now as it was in 1939, but it's still generally funny.

I will say that the small format makes Robinson's drawings more cramped than I might have preferred - a bigger art-book style presentation is probably a stronger choice for Robinson appreciation, and, assuming I do go back to check out more Robinson, I'll probably head in that direction next time.