Fuel rushes in with Wow factor

With the view that the Internet is a vast, diverse and mostly unsatisfactory resource, Laurence King Publishing and design group Fuel have jointly developed a printed review and guide to selected parts of it.

Wow Wow, by a selection of authors including Liz Farrelly, Creative Review editor Patrick Burgoyne and Stephen Bayley, looks at a weird and wonderful selection of peculiar websites.

Included is everything from trailer park travel guides exploring Great Mobile Homes of Mississippi to fetish sites examining X-rays of objects found stuck in men’s rectums, via picture banks of women exposing their breasts as they pass the souvenir camera on Disney log flumes.

Design is by Miles Murray Sorrell at Fuel. As joint originator of the book, Sorrell was keen to move away from the aesthetics of the Internet, says business partner Stephen Sorrell. The book therefore shows the content of the sites chosen, but not pages of the sites themselves. Sorrell has used a variety of print and fonts in the book, in a nod to on-line text links.

The book does not, however, suffer from the legibility problems which seem to afflict so many Web-based books. By not simply reproducing Web pages, text and all the book is more attractive and easier to read. This, in conjunction with the mostly well written text, manages to effectively convey the spirit of the sites in question.

Publication date is 17 April.