2008 Woodie Awards
Review of the Week:
Found: The Best Lost, Tossed and Forgotten Items From Around the World
Stefanie Quashnick
Issue date: 12/10/04 Section: No Limits
- Page 1 of 1
Have you ever found a note on the ground? Did it excite you to pick it up, open it, and read what was written inside? Maybe it contained a girls profession of love to her boyfriend, or those dreaded words, "We have to break up..." Then again, the piece of paper could have also contained someone's long-lost to-do list, a grocery list, or even sketches or doodles.
"Since grade school I've been collecting notes, letters, photographs...stuff I found on the ground. It always amazed me how powerfully I could connect with a person I'd never met just by reading a half page love letter left behind," says Davy Rothbart.
Rothbart, creator of Found Magazine and author of FOUND: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items From Around the World, has made a life out of looking for and finding other people's stuff.
When I first flipped through the pages of Found Magazine in Tower Records, I knew immediately that I had to buy it. There's just something so exciting about finding other people's left-behinds, whether it be restroom graffiti, chicken scratches on school desks, or notes left on car windshields.
The book version of FOUND is like one giant dose of the magazine, with 252 pages of found notes, letters, newspaper clippings, photographs, to-do lists, grocery lists, emails, filled out surveys, sketches, lost flyers, journal entries, postcards and artwork.
So what's the attraction to finding some leftover junk that you have no idea where it came from? Why would anyone care about the trivial, day-to-day expressions of total strangers? As Rothbart explains in his book, "Found notes and letters open up the entire range of human experience; they offer a shortcut directly into people's minds and hearts."
By discovering a little piece of someone, even a person we may never meet, a connection is made. Finding a cryptic note or letter forces us to imagine whom it was that wrote it, who was meant to read it, and how it came to end up in the place it was found. Imagining the individuals involved and trying to fill in the details to a mystery is part of what's so fun about "found" objects.
Poring over the pages of FOUND, I feel as if I'm privileged to see these things, these private letters and scribbling meant for the writers' eyes only. The photos and drawings feel even more sacred, and it's as if I'm looking through someone's family album.
FOUND is a perfect book for all sorts of readers, whether it's those who have a short attention span and just like reading short blurbs and stories, or if anyone who is the slightest bit snoopy (or curious) about the goings-on in other peoples lives. Be careful though - you never know if something of yours will be FOUND some day!
Both the book and magazine versions of FOUND are available online at http://www.foundmagazine.com, and at local bookstores. To submit your own finds, send them to: Found Magazine, 3455 Charing Cross Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48108-1911.
"Since grade school I've been collecting notes, letters, photographs...stuff I found on the ground. It always amazed me how powerfully I could connect with a person I'd never met just by reading a half page love letter left behind," says Davy Rothbart.
Rothbart, creator of Found Magazine and author of FOUND: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items From Around the World, has made a life out of looking for and finding other people's stuff.
When I first flipped through the pages of Found Magazine in Tower Records, I knew immediately that I had to buy it. There's just something so exciting about finding other people's left-behinds, whether it be restroom graffiti, chicken scratches on school desks, or notes left on car windshields.
The book version of FOUND is like one giant dose of the magazine, with 252 pages of found notes, letters, newspaper clippings, photographs, to-do lists, grocery lists, emails, filled out surveys, sketches, lost flyers, journal entries, postcards and artwork.
So what's the attraction to finding some leftover junk that you have no idea where it came from? Why would anyone care about the trivial, day-to-day expressions of total strangers? As Rothbart explains in his book, "Found notes and letters open up the entire range of human experience; they offer a shortcut directly into people's minds and hearts."
By discovering a little piece of someone, even a person we may never meet, a connection is made. Finding a cryptic note or letter forces us to imagine whom it was that wrote it, who was meant to read it, and how it came to end up in the place it was found. Imagining the individuals involved and trying to fill in the details to a mystery is part of what's so fun about "found" objects.
Poring over the pages of FOUND, I feel as if I'm privileged to see these things, these private letters and scribbling meant for the writers' eyes only. The photos and drawings feel even more sacred, and it's as if I'm looking through someone's family album.
FOUND is a perfect book for all sorts of readers, whether it's those who have a short attention span and just like reading short blurbs and stories, or if anyone who is the slightest bit snoopy (or curious) about the goings-on in other peoples lives. Be careful though - you never know if something of yours will be FOUND some day!
Both the book and magazine versions of FOUND are available online at http://www.foundmagazine.com, and at local bookstores. To submit your own finds, send them to: Found Magazine, 3455 Charing Cross Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48108-1911.