July 14, 2004
Magazine never at a loss for material
Found full of lists, love letters, rants, songs and photos
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
If you've lost your sense of drama, humor or perspective on human nature, a flip through the latest issue of Found Magazine should restore it quickly.
With the third issue out and a new book compilation for sale, founder Davy Rothbart is in the midst of a 50-state tour that ends in December. Rothbart hit northwest Michigan Sunday evening, reading snippets of found items at Horizon Books to an appreciative audience of approximately 30 people.
This stop is one of dozens on the Slap Dance Across America Tour that is also promoting his new book: "The Best Lost, Tossed and Forgotten Items From Around the World."
Culling from items sent by finders around the country, the magazine and book contain lists, poems, songs, rants, rages, drawings, photos and letters - anything and everything someone might have one day scribbled down. From budgets with line items for crack cocaine and attorney fees to teen girl hate notes to a student's failed but valiant algebra test, Rothbart celebrates the mundane and the bizarre. Context need not apply.
"It's interesting, you never know what you are going to get," said Rothbart of the 50-100 items that arrive from around the country and world at his magazine headquarters in Ann Arbor. "What I'm struck by as I'm reading things is that love and relationships seem to be on so many people's minds."
The arrivals as well as what he finds himself are beacons of messiness in a media-packaged world. Found Magazine embodies the uncertainties, each item's lack of background or future stimulating the imagination.
"You always encounter these stories that are neatly packaged in movies, books and on TV," Rothbart said. "But life is ragged, endings are confused and you don't know how things are going to turn out."
"I've found that different people look at something and come up with two different things about it," he noted.
Rothbart began the magazine in 2001 and publishes an issue about once a year. He and some friends began by compiling oddities they discovered, splatting them onto paper with curt captions explaining etiology. Demand and word of mouth promotion for that first issue quickly outstripped the 50 or so copies made. Production runs zoomed to the thousands and Found Magazine also has a zippy website featuring the best find the week and information on submitting items.
Found Magazine has become a phenomenon, netting extensive positive press and even a visit to the David Letterman Show six weeks ago. There, Rothbart found a kindred soul.
"I shared a bunch of my finds with him and it turns out that he [Letterman] finds stuff and in September when I'm on again he's going to bring his stuff," Rothbart said.
An inveterate storyteller and talented writer himself, Rothbart can be heard on public radio's This American Life. A University of Michigan graduate, he has cultivated a network of finders around the country that keep material coming in to create an average of one magazine a year. There's the 96-year-old guy in Florida who finds things on the sand during daily walks, dries them out and sends them to Rothbart.
Or the person in Los Angeles who found on a dumpster near his apartment a poster of a naked guy playing a saxophone. Not having an envelope handy, this enterprising finder simply wrote Found Magazine's address on the back of the 8 « by 11-inch poster, slapped on a few stamps and mailed it. It duly arrived and the audacity of it's trip fascinates Rothbart.
Or the moving, personal note a young man wrote to his mother. Rothbart's friend spotted this note suspended high in a tree, dangling from a balloon and climbed up to get it. Since the note was found in a cemetery, Rothbart conjectures that the mother had died and her son was reaching out to her.
"For me, it's ones like this one that affect me so much," he said. "They make me want to collect all this stuff in the street or even hanging from a balloon in a cemetery."