Liven Up Your Coffee Break

In the imaginative world of Heath Robinson you can pour a cup of coffee with your eyes closed. Just pull on a cord and the Super-De-Luxe Coffee Maker does it all for you. What could be easier? This and other inventive ideas will liven up your coffee break when you use the set of six Heath Robinson coasters we launch today.

As these coasters demonstrate, Heath Robinson could make light work of any social or domestic difficulty with a few strokes of his pen. Whether you are worried about spilling soup down your shirt or finding a comfortable way to eat a picnic, he has an ingenious solution. Giving in to his wicked side, he couldn’t resist adding a dash of social commentary. Look more closely at his beautifully observed drawings and you will see there are twists and turns in all of them. From the expression on the maid’s face as the guests are led to the latest, all-in-one tubular-steel dining suite, to the soda syphon balanced on a well-trained branch of a tree, primed for another whisky, there are myriad details waiting to be discovered in each one.

Funny serious
Heath Robinson’s characters exhibit a cheerful stoicism as they adapt to the exigencies of modern life. Diminished by war and recession, unable to afford staff, they are forced to rely more and more on labour-saving devices. This is where Heath Robinson comes into his own, inventing ever more madcap ideas for securing mod cons in daily life. All the work is done by machinery. As Philip Pullman says in his Foreword to Very Heath Robinson, ‘the food, the drink, the soda syphon, the plates (a choice of hot or cold) are delivered by a vast and elaborate system of pulleys, weights and levers’. If you are to keep up appearances amidst all this, you need a straight face, and that’s what you see on the coasters. The ‘members of the Heath Robinson repertory company don’t know they’re being ridiculous’, says Pullman. ‘They are convinced they are being entirely rational and clever and up-to-date. They’re silly and harmless and delightful, because they don’t realize they’re any of those things.’

The perfect gift for Christmas
This set of six coasters will both serve a useful purpose and waft you away into the absurdly ingenious world of Heath Robinson. If you want to get caught up in this delicately spun web of wit and satire, you can order them here.