Waft 5 is now available in the Petrolicious Shop.
It’s easy to overfill a bookshelf with good reading material that you’ll get to “someday,” but it’s even easier to fill it with junk. This is as true of serialized romance novels featuring models who happen to work on horse ranches in Wyoming as it is of automotive books that claim to offer fresh perspectives on everyone’s favorite stories that turn out to be near-plagiarized retreads that aren’t even worth the gloss paper they’ve wasted. And the good stuff usually falls into one of two categories: coffee table tomes offering pages of the finest photography on a great collection of cars with little in the way of text to get in the way of pretty pictures, or else they are the kinds of fact-and-data heavy blocks of print that in addition to being top-quality resource materials, serve as a sound replacement for sleeping medication. And then there are those rare and wonderful works like the line of Waft books which manage to mine the middle ground.
We’ve been fans of the husband and wife team behind this sequential series since they’re inaugural effort (though “effort” on its own sort of implies that it was not followed by success, of which their work categorically is successful in any metric you want to apply to it), and we are pleased to get our hands on the newest, Waft 5, let alone share the incredible storytelling with our like-minded readers and anyone else who appreciates quality and care. To say nothing of the car content inside.
Like the preceding titles, Waft 5 is again a product of high-level photography, storytelling, and of course automobiles harmonizing on the printed page. Of course, we publish our own things on the medium that is the vastness of the Internet, but that’s not to suggest that print isn’t something all of us love to indulge in, and importantly, support. And that support isn’t hard to muster when it’s something like this. Featuring in-depth and insightful tales of car owners, designers, journalists, and everyone in between, Waft 5 brings a new cast between the covers, including the cusp of modern metal like the McLaren P1 (and the P1 GTR, because no because needed); a portrait of the futurist design legend Syd Mead; the salt of the earth participants in Bonneville Speed Week; the piece of the electric future of supercars that goes by the name of Renault Trezor; a Rolls Royce Wraith and what it means to drive luxuriously and why that’s important and not merely whimsy; and as every list ends: a whole lot more.
Waft Publishing is on a hot streak and the latest will singe your eyes with more gorgeous locations being interrupted by our favorite four-wheeled interlopers. The writing is fun, doesn’t take itself too seriously, and yet always manages to leave a lingering sense that you’ve just read something important once you’ve finished.
I can continue throwing (earned) hyperboles at the thing, or you can pick up a copy, read it, and come up with your own. You can find Waft 5 and other titles in the series in the Petrolicious Shop.
