FOUND magazine

"FOUND," both magazine and book, is a voyeur's dream. Exploring its pages, one gets a giddy high from its privileged, unauthorized glimpse into the private lives of strangers. Some of the stuff is hilarious, some of it achingly sad or pathetic, but nothing is less than human -- and nothing is all that different from what most of us have thought or written at one time or another. - San Francisco Chronicle, June 2nd, 2004

[FOUND is] an endlessly entertaining, and frequently moving, peek into people's lives. FOUND II, the successor to the first FOUND collection published in 2004, has plenty of the former [notes] and a fair number of the latter, all of them enthralling. - The Onion - Fall, 2006

We are all crazy and insecure. Davy Rothbart knows this because he finds our letters and our notes, our secret thoughts jotted down on scraps of paper in our most honest, vulnerable moments. Not to mention our shopping lists and telephone bills... Much of the material is practically poetic in its economy of language, the tight, simple writing that describes or hints at so much roiling emotion... But after you read a few of these, you get to appreciate the lost-and-found pieces as complete works, regardless of what might be missing... Besides, once you've read a found note like "The iguana is loose on the porch," what else do you really need to know? - Philadelphia Inquirer - May 12th, 2004

FOUND Magazine is the ultimate reality programming, a powerful fix for thinking voyeurs... - The Boston Globe - July 14th, 2003

"The world is full of lost love letters if you know where to look. Davy Rothbart, the publisher of the magazine FOUND, knows where to look: the floors of city buses, the recycling bins behind Kinko's, the backstops of windblown ball fields. Rothbart and a growing army of fellow-scavengers are constantly finding doodles, diaries, report cards, and appeals to conscience ("If you took my detergent I'm sure it was a mistake so I'm not mad yet"). Then Rothbart publishes these finds in FOUND, adding curatorial captions in a welter of typefaces, ransom-note style. His magazine is as unexpected as a tumbleweed..." - The New Yorker - November 11th, 2002

In the tradition of NPR's National Story Project comes this funky collection of letters, flyers and other miscellany from the pages of Found magazine. Rothbart, the magazine's editor and founder, has pulled together the funniest, weirdest and most moving items found by himself and his readers over the years.

Fairly typical is the note left on a car's windshield, intended for a wayward boyfriend named Mario: "You said you had to work then whys your car here at HER place?.... I hate you..." piling invective upon invective until concluding: "p.s. Page me later." Rothbart and company find stuff just about everywhere: on buses, taped to trees, underneath Coke machines, in the recycling bin at Kinko's.

Some items are heartbreaking (a missing person poster found in Manhattan after September 11), some hilarious (an algebra test, flunked with creativity and panache) and some just plain odd (a note directing residents to lock a door in order to "prevent unauthorized people from entering the building and defecating in the washing machine"). There are some explanations, but mostly, the trash speaks for itself, reproduced with Rothbart's particular punk-collagist aesthetic. At times, reading the notes and letters feels uncomfortably voyeuristic, and inevitably, readers are left wanting more, wishing for details about these lives beyond what the sketchy fragments provide (did that scoundrel Mario ever change his wanton ways?).

A provocative and original book, Rothbart's collection manages to pull laughter and drama from the flotsam and jetsam of society. - Publishers Weekly