Off the Shelf - The Airship in Animal Land

This is the second collaboration between the children’s author, Clifton Bingham and the illustrator, G H Thompson to be featured here. A predecessor, The Animal’s Trip to Sea, can be seen here.  The Airship in Animal Land follows the same format and formula with 8 full-page chromolithographed plates and dates from around 1910.  In a reckless endeavour, a family of bears take to the sky in a home made aircraft, spreading alarm and consternation before crash landing after an unlikely encounter with two elephants in a balloon. The charm of the book is almost entirely due to Thompson’s lively anthropomorphic drawings, packed full with detail to engage the observant child.  Perhaps there’s a not so well hidden message to young readers about the perils of overreaching oneself, in tune with the advice of experts of the time.  But the visuals display a swaggering good humour from which no amount of preaching could seriously detract.

 

Heath Robinson’s Merrie Monarchs

Two volumes of Monarchs of Merrie England were published in 1907. Each volume had 10 colour plates by W Heath Robinson (WHR) and humorous verses by Roland Carse.  A much abbreviated edition followed in 1910 comprising 4 card covered volumes, each with 2 colour plates. Which is what we are showing here.  WHR’s lively illustrations are full of movement and incisive drawing and form a perfect accompaniment to Carse’s rhyming couplets.  At this point in his career, WHR was mostly employed illustrating more prestigious colour-plate gift books and critical voices have overlooked Monarchs of Merrie England in favour of Bill the Minder, Twelfth Night and Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales.  Printers Thomas Forman of Nottingham extended the life of these illustrations in the form of postcards that were marketed to small traders to publicise their services.