Lock, stock and barrel, magazine devoted to Southern way of life
By JIM AUCHMUTEY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Susan Bridges had dueling reactions when she first encountered Garden & Gun, a lavish new magazine about Southern culture and lifestyle. While the name made her smile, it also stirred up some prickly memories.
Charleston, S.C.-based magazine is about more than the name implies. It targets well-heeled Southerners.“It made me think of my ex-husband and all the guns he had,” she said, allowing that she owns no guns herself — just a machete. “But I love the magazine. We have a lot of cool things in the South.”
Bridges was sipping a cocktail at a rolling-out party for the publication in Atlanta. Her gallery, Whitespace, is featured in a 10-page spread about the city in the new issue. She and a few dozen others were mingling with the editor and publisher at Repast, a chic Midtown restaurant known for a menu item with its own shotgun-marriage name: foie gras hot dogs. The banner out front proclaiming “Garden & Gun” looked a bit out of place in an intown neighborhood where guns are usually not considered good news.
Garden & Gun is trying to take root in some hard soil. Outside of Southern Living, few magazines targeted at the South have ever been commercially successful.
No one would confuse G&G with Southern Living.
For one thing, editor Sid Evans said, “We don’t have pictures of cakes on the cover.”
Based in Charleston, S.C., the bimonthly magazine appeals to well-heeled Southerners with a mix of articles about music, art, literature, food, the land and, of course, hunting and fishing. It’s printed on glossy paper and features sumptuous photography and evocative writing from big-name authors like Reynolds Price, Clyde Egerton, Winston Groom and Roy Blount Jr.
The total effect is sort of Oxford American meets Town & Country.
“With some Vanity Fair, Texas Monthly and Gray’s Sporting Journal thrown in,” Evans added. “We’re a difficult magazine to pigeonhole.”
‘A gutsy name’
Samir Husni, a University of Mississippi journalism professor who studies magazines, has been impressed. He named Garden & Gun one of the hottest launches of last year, despite his initial reservations about the name.
“It usually isn’t a good idea to make people wonder what your publication is about,” Husni said. “But they’ve managed to turn it to their advantage. Once you get past the name, it’s a great magazine.”
Publisher Rebecca Darwin admitted that she “gulped” the first time she saw the proposed title. It was coined by the founding editor, John Wilson, who knew that Garden & Gun had been the name of a popular disco in Charleston.
“It’s a gutsy name,” Darwin said. “But if we had called it something like The South Today, it would have been such a snore.”
G&G was something of a homecoming for Darwin. Raised in Columbia, she went to New York after college and made it big in the magazine world, with high-level posts at GQ, Mirabella, Fortune and The New Yorker, where she became its first female publisher.
She stepped away from magazines when her husband, an actor and TV producer, decided to change careers and become a minister. The couple moved to Princeton, N.J., where he attended seminary, and then to South Carolina when he was called to pastor a Presbyterian church in Charleston.
As she settled into her new home, Darwin met Pierre Manigault, the chairman of the privately held company that publishes Charleston’s daily newspaper, The Post and Courier. He had been thinking about diversifying into niche magazine publishing.
“We need a New Yorker in the South,” Darwin remembers him telling her.
She wasn’t sure about that. But she did think there was an opening for an upscale magazine about the cultural treasures and sporting traditions of the South.
A plan to expand
Only nine issues into the venture, G&G is progressing nicely. The magazine has a paid circulation of 60,000, with a total distribution approaching 200,000. While it has subscribers in all 50 states, most of them are in the Southeast. One in eight is in Georgia.
With profitability in sight, the corporate parent is planning to launch more niche publications. “We’re building a national magazine company that happens to be in Charleston,” Darwin said.
One of the publisher’s key moves was to hire a new editor, Sid Evans, a Memphis native who had spent a decade and a half guiding magazines in New York. He was editor of Men’s Journal and Field & Stream, which received seven nominations for National Magazine Awards during his tenure.
Evans is an outdoorsman who likes to hunt and fish and shoot skeet. While he enjoyed New York, he always felt a bit like a deer who had wandered in from the woods.
“Any notion of the outdoors is foreign to a lot of New Yorkers,” he said. “I would tell friends about going duck hunting in Louisiana, and they had no idea what I meant. They didn’t understand the social aspects of it and how important that sort of thing is to Southern culture.”
When he first heard the name Garden & Gun, Evans remembered, he smiled and got it immediately. “I thought it must be a magazine about the South.”
At issue: Atlanta ‘secrets’
A magazine is known by its cover. The September-October issue of Garden & Gun touts articles about Miranda Lambert (“The Next Loretta Lynn”), the best of the New South (“50 People, Places and Things We Love”), the Lost Confederados (“Why They’re Singing ‘Dixie’ in Brazil”), an oyster roast, “the perfect Bloody Mary” and a memoir of Bo Diddley by Jimmy Buffett. In a rarity for the magazine, there’s no cover line about hunting or fishing.
The cover also teases to the magazine’s 10-page package of articles about “Charming Atlanta: Secrets of the City.” The pieces (which include some reporting by AJC food writer John Kessler) offer G&G readers a sampling of Atlanta culture and cuisine ranging from the Ghetto Burger at Ann’s Snack Bar to the sandwiches at Star Provisions.
Candice Dyer’s portrait of Atlanta, titled “The Brazen City,” offers this summation of the city’s sometimes contradictory character: “[Its] relentless boosterism, shellacked in social conscience, has never dimmed and, some dark days notwithstanding, has shaped Atlanta’s peculiar character as a boomtown where wheeler-dealers substitute gumption for bigotry (which is bad for bidniss).”
— Jim Auchmutey
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