You might have come across it on Kickstarter or covered in the golf media. But you haven’t really seen Catalogue 18 until you hold it in your hands and smell the ink. Golf’s newest magazine is only available in print — and when you see it, you’ll understand why.
The new annual magazine, crowdfunded on Kickstarter and showcasing two dozen of the world’s best golf photographers and artists, might well be the game’s most beautiful subscriber publication. In an age of digital media saturation, Catalogue 18 is a throwback to the days when you could hold a well-crafted object in your hands: a watch, a record, a book.
These products are more relevant than ever now, as long as their quality makes them worth the premium. That’s certainly true of Catalogue 18, which early reviews have called everything from “exquisite” to “visionary.”
“Large-format print is the ideal canvas for these landscape images. You can see every fairway ripple, every blade of grass in a way you never would on Instagram,” says Catalogue 18 publisher Guy Nicholson, a lifelong golfer and former newspaper editor.
“You wouldn’t buy great photography or a painting and put it on your iPad. You’d want it large, on paper, right in front of you. That’s Catalogue 18,” he says.
Sharply designed by Toronto’s Studio Wyse, Catalogue 18 is a massive volume that will keep a reader engaged for weeks or months. It has the heft and print quality of a coffee-table book, but the look and feel of a cutting-edge magazine.
The featured photographers and artists are together in one place for the first time — established names like David Cannon, David Scaletti, Linda Hartough and Ottawa’s Tony Harris, but also up-and-coming stars like Jacob Sjöman, Channing Benjamin, Patrick Koenig and Lee Wybranski.
The cover of the launch issue features a dramatic drone’s-eye view of the 6th hole at Nova Scotia’s Cabot Cliffs, taken by Evan Schiller. Inside, the landscapes keep coming — 300 pages of lavish spreads, shots and stories focused on more than 100 courses, from Ireland and Indonesia to Mexico and Morocco.
Catalogue 18 was crowdfunded late last year with almost $50,000 in contributions from online supporters in Canada and around the world. After printing in Winnipeg, it arrived with a bang in late March, when copies started reaching Kickstarter patrons around the world. As the online buzz spread, subscriptions took off and retailers started calling. The first run of 1,000 copies was more than half sold by the night of the magazine’s launch party, and Nicholson is now considering reprinting the first issue, even as he begins work on the second.
The magazine sells for $60 U.S. ($80 Canadian) plus shipping at catalogue18.com. It comes annually, but there’s no commitment — subscribers can opt out at any time. Nicholson has a special deal for the first 100 new readers who subscribe using the coupon code TRAVELINGGOLFER: $5 off the launch issue.
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April 2019
