At ‘Found’ party, pickups galore

Davy Rothbart created Found Magazine three years ago. But you’d forgive the 29-year-old for feeling a bit lost these days.

He’s in the final weeks of a 136-city tour to tout his book, “Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items.” Like the magazine, it’s a collection of discarded lists, love notes, hate letters, doodles and Polaroids. Since pulling out of Ann Arbor, Mich., in April, Rothbart and his 24-year-old brother, Peter, have spent an awful lot of time in the 1999 Dodge Ram they bought on EBay.

“Found” parties like the two scheduled here this weekend are hardly run-of-the-mill book signings. Rothbard reads new and classic items. Peter sings songs they inspired. And then they ask for more finds for the next issue.

It’s like show-and-tell for grown-ups, he says. “What’s been awesome is to meet the people who found the stuff that’s in the book and to get them to autograph pages in my book.”

About every third day, he discovers a new favorite found object. One he just got was a set of instructions crafted by some kid in Dallas:

Destroy Matt

1. Wait until Matt is asleep

2. Make sure he is asleep

3. Pour water on his pants

4. Total humiliation

But many of the misplaced missives are hardly so trivial. Last week in Albuquerque, Rothbart was handed two letters found several years apart: The first was from a Sudanese man to his siblings, about the death of their mother; the second, a nearly identical letter, was from a man in Connecticut. “You see from these that they are experiencing the same basic emotions, but they are from very different people,” he says.