A Magazine’s Treasures Are Bits of Life’s Debris

One frigid Chicago winter night in 1999, Davy Rothbart found a strange note tucked under the wiper of his Toyota Camry. “Mario: I

But the kicker came after the author’s signature: “PS Page me later.”

Rothbart saved the note for two years and published it in the flagship issue of his magazine, Found, a publication devoted to discoveries like this one.

“I’ve been saving stuff like this forever, ever since I was a kid and friends started occasionally sending me things they had found,” Rothbart says. “People bring their own readings and experiences to these notes. Like this one [to Mario]--they can be very universal. We’ve all had moments like this. We want to express outrage and pain and sorrow, but we still need that person, no matter how much we want to shut them off. It’s so short, like poetry; it could be out of Shakespeare.”

Found is an anthology of these accidentally discovered missives. Call them Shakespeare, or call them litter--this collection certainly provides a window into the mystery of unknown lives. “The human experience is represented in these notes,” says Rothbart. “You don’t have all the pieces of this person’s puzzle. You have to fill in the blanks of their lives yourself.”

Rothbart hardly set out to be a publishing magnate. The genesis of Found is as spontaneous as the documents collected in its pages. Rothbart, a 26-year-old writer and documentarian, assembled the magazine one night this spring, brought the pages to a Chicago Kinko’s and got together with a group of friends to staple thousands of photocopied pages. He passed out the first printing at a party.

In a few months the magazine went through a second printing and spread to independent bookstores across the country. (Suitably, the magazine’s “distributor” is a motley collective of Rothbart’s far-reaching acquaintances, who volunteer to drop off boxes of the publication at local shops.) In New York they’ve already sold out. In Los Angeles, bookstores such as K-Bond on Beverly Boulevard, Dutton’s Books in Brentwood and Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard have seen quite a demand. The appeal is clear: Found is a trash-picker’s and anthropologist’s dream come true.

Like the writing inside, the feel of the magazine is anything but slick. While its dimensions reflect standard magazine printing, desktop publishing seems high-tech compared with the print production of Found: Rothbart doesn’t even use a paper cutter to smooth out the edges of its muddy black-and-white contents, all affixed to the pages with visible adhesive tape. The design--while thematically appropriate to the content, and quite a part of its charm--is as much an accident as anything else in Found. “I’d probably do a sports magazine the same way--it’s just what I’ve got,” says Rothbart.

And a business plan? The whole operation is financed with money Rothbart earned while scalping tickets to Chicago Bulls games during their heyday. “I made a lot of money--but I retired when Jordan did,” he says with a chuckle. The dollar Rothbart keeps from each $5 issue will help finance future editions.

In addition to lost love notes, discarded resumes and abandoned travel journals, more traditional forms of fiction and interviews also find their way into Found.

A short story by author Charles Baxter has been photocopied straight from the pages of its original collection and included here. It’s the tale of a disturbing scrap of paper that comes to the attention of the story’s protagonist--like so many of the scrawled notes of warning gathered in this magazine. Baxter was Rothbart’s professor at Michigan and is a fan of Rothbart and his recent brainchild.

“For most young writers, the project is to get their work, themselves, their egos out into the public. But that’s not what Davy is doing. He’s instead created a magazine of cultural artifacts, and there’s something quite selfless about it,” says Baxter, who places Found in the tradition of found-object art dating to Picasso’s sculptures (think of discarded household items in his guitar sculptures, a bicycle seat forming the head of a bull).

In this issue, an interview with cartoonist and dump devotee Lynda Barry (whose trash-picking alias is “Scroungina”) appears, along with some of her cartoons of objects she’s discovered. Her thoughts read like the magazine’s manifesto, conjuring the surprise and romance of “trash”--she refuses to dress these objects up in cultural-studies terminology.

“‘You don’t know where that thing has been’ is either a nightmare or a dream statement depending on the person picking up the thing,” says Barry, who attests to the thrill of “rescuing some otherwise overlookable thing from oblivion.”

Through the magazine, Rothbart has discovered a scattered society of found-document collectors like himself. A man in Tucson (who prefers not to be named here) contacted Rothbart to share his collection of hundreds of thousands of documents (organized in categories like “breakup letters,” “shopping lists” and “prison inmate mail”) with Found. “It’s a form of voyeurism,” the man says of his collecting. “It’s a beautiful way of being interested in other people.”

It’s evident that some of the discovered objects in Found develop layers of meaning and sentimentality perhaps beyond those imparted by the intended owner of each object. In the magazine there’s a photo of a buckled Mary Jane shoe. “I think the thing I’ve owned the longest is this little girl’s lost shoe,” writes the finder, Starlee Kine. Kine and her best friend found the pair of shoes in the middle of a Chicago street six years ago, split the pair between them and have held fast to them since. When Kine moved to another city “that creepy little shoe was the first thing packed,” she writes.

“You go to someone’s house and see their favorite found objects on the dresser in their bedroom, or hung up on their fridge,” says Rothbart. “The spiritual and emotional weight of them can be overwhelming.” Rothbart has been touring the country, holding parties for the magazine where people can come to offer objects they’ve found and to read discovered documents aloud. “Reading these notes and searching for the lives behind them is an imaginative process--a very interpretive process,” he says. “People all over are just digging it.”

Found will hold its first Los Angeles party in February. Check www.foundmagazine.com for details.