[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.

FOUND magazine, the witty, inexhaustible, much-lauded periodical featuring an edited array of things formerly misplaced, dropped, or otherwise left behind by others - photographs, laundry lists, love notes, diary pages - now comes in film form. Crazy and Beautiful, the first FOUND Magazine Video Show, is a Frankenstein-like assemblage of clips from a plethora of how-to videos, home movies, and vacation video-ops that slipped away from their original owners only to be rediscovered by tenacious FOUND contributors: think of it as stream-of-consciousness video anthropology. (AF)

December 11, 2004
The editors of FOUND Magazine are known for collecting and preserving ephemera -- photos, notes, and the like -- so when Houston microcinema curator Andrea Grover decided to look for castoff bits of video, she knew where to turn for help. The result, FOUND Magazine's FOUND Video Festival, is an absurd grab bag of discarded tidbits, including outmoded instructional tapes, video diaries, and TV commercial outtakes. One of Grover's favorites is Farrah: Amateur Music Video, which captures a young girl badly lip-syncing a Dolly Parton song in a "make your own music video" booth, but, as Grover puts it, "the '80s video effects make up for it -- washes and fades and yes, a star wipe!" Yuks aplenty! Other priceless treats include January Jubilee 2000, a performance by a group of middle-school students who apparently learned their dance moves from bump-and-grind rap videos, and Deposition of Mrs. X, a courtroom document that shows a divorcing wife squirming uncomfortably in front of the camera while her ex's lawyers enumerate her failings.

February 26, 2005
We shudder to think what sorts of home videos could turn up in tonight's screening of the FOUND Magazine Video Show. Shudder, of course, to think about Go!'s own lost celluloid treasures. Would FOUND be so cruel as to exhibit footage from our third-grade music pageant in which we sported a cherry-red cummerbund, a wide snaggle-toothed grin, a woeful part in our baby 'fro, and gleefully sang ''Suzy Snowflake"? Heartless fiends! Instead, we're happy to be laughing at other sad sacks, including poor Farrah (inset). Yes, she looks a little shaky, but that's because the makers of the film play all kinds of tricks on her with special effects.

In the pages of FOUND, crinkly, out-of-focus snapshots become spooky visual poetry, providing the briefest glimpses into strangers' most personal moments, alternately absurd and poignant. Though at first the Intuit gallery's 'outsider art' proclivities seem a bit incongruous with FOUND's prosaic hodgepodge, one look at the crumpled scrap of paper on which a young child has painstakingly scratched the words "I LOVE" with a ballpoint pen, and suddenly the naïve 'art' of these everyday treasures becomes clear.

The popularity of reality programming shows how fascinated we are by human interactions. The strikingly insipid and compulsive behaviour exhibited by those on television - we, of course, would never stoop to such actions - allows us to feel superior. This has to be a cunning ploy on the part of the producers to get us to watch... FOUND, on the other hand, conjures up no such illusion. One of the most striking things about it is that it showcases how much we all have in common. We all think our ideas and sorrows, our aches and joys are unique, when in actual fact we're all the same...

Tonight's event is sponsored by Boston University's Photographic Resource Center, which has a concurrent exhibit of found Polaroids up at the Sherman Gallery at BU through Dec. 17. Says PRC curator Leslie Brown: ''It's this celebration of the vernacular photo, the everyday photo, things not considered fine art but which account for the majority of production. I'd seen these FOUND Magazine guys" do their thing in bookstores, '' and they're hysterical. I thought I'd extend the philosophy of found, anonymous everyday things."

October 13, 2004
The mystery comes from the feelings you get when you read page after page of strangers' lost letters, forgotten love notes or thrown away photos. What is that feeling anyway? Is it a voyeuristic sense of guilt for knowing things about people that you were never intended to know? Or is it a sort of skewed intimacy you feel when you realize other people doodle about the same random things you do? Who knows. But what Davy knows is that the brilliance comes into play when you capitalize on people's natural curiosity about everyone else's personal lives.

October 2004
Honest, sometimes funny and sometimes raw, the notes and pictures collaged onto the pages of FOUND Magazine are truer and more genuine than perhaps any other literature. Impossible to contrive, these scraps collected from streets and trash bins are pieces of real stories, not written by great writers, but hinted at on post-it notes and spooky torn photos, by their real characters.

July 3, 2004
"Sweet like stone fruits, as singular as seashells and far, far stranger than fiction, the scraps of abandoned reading matter randomly accumulated and bound into FOUND belong at the centre of the summer experience... FOUND validates and stimulates a wayward, timeless gathering impulse. Try not picking up the next piece of tightly folded yellow legal paper you come across. Try not looking for one. The authors of the messages, unmasking and skewering themselves in their willful self-expression, are us, too."

June 16, 2004
Part of the joy of FOUND magazine is that these are the sort of notes we all make for ourselves, the same photographs we all take of family occasions, beach holidays and small-town parades. These are the items we all pick up, compulsively, in photocopy shops and outside photo booths, and from the counter of the corner shop. They are snippets, fragments out of all context, yet they succeed in being poignant, hilarious and frequently profound.

June 8, 2004
The lists, letters, photographs and fliers offer a unique glimpse into the human psyche and prove our inner lives are not as uniquely wonderful, or wrenching, as we think.

June 6, 2004
Last month, Rothbart and his team released a book called "FOUND: The Best Lost, Tossed and Forgotten Items from Around the World" published by Simon and Schuster. Once you pick it up, you'll find it difficult to put down... Inside the 252 pages of Rothbart's book are some of the funniest and occasionally sobering found items you can possibly imagine... And that's why this book and FOUND magazine is a sociologists and psychologists dream. It's amazing what some people will write down on paper.

June 2, 2004
"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.

May 21, 2004
"Part of the pleasure of FOUND Magazine is knowing that the concept behind it would have been howled down within seconds by any major periodical publisher. It is a brilliantly simple idea: contributors pick litter up and then print their most intriguing finds with no editorial comment beyond the occasional quizzical caption. The result is a kind of literary eavesdropping, slightly voyeuristic yet utterly compelling. "

May 19, 2004
Ranging from the achingly intimate to the comically bizarre and dully routine, FOUND is an assemblage of the detritus of our lives: old photographs, to-do lists, love letters, napkin poetry, or birthday cards found on break-room bulletin boards, car windshields, or the sidewalk... But, this record of daily life is undoubtedly more "real" than most reality programming. No one in its pages is forced into staged situations, no one is over produced, highly edited, publicly humiliated, pumped with silicone or forced to drink offal and intestine milkshakes. Instead, they are captured quietly in time, the waste of their lives reexamined, recontextualized, and earnestly appreciated. The presentation is neither judgmental nor saccharine, but plainly straightforward. The book offers whole pages from a lost notebook found in the streets of Austin documenting the everyday struggles of a young chef battling heroin addiction--a combination of recipes for crab cakes and sorbet along with entries about trying for one more day sober. People in all their foibles, fears, eccentricities, and boring normality are offered up, pinned almost like butterfly specimens to the page.

Though Rothbart and Bitner must sift through and pare down the enormous number of submissions they receive, the overall effect feels charmingly haphazard--unedited and unplanned--with the thought-provoking nuzzling up against the childishly humorous and the strange.

At its best, FOUND can be rather moving, something that can rarely be said about most fare in the reality genre. Some of the most evocative pieces almost read like tiny, fractured stories.

May 15, 2004
"The creators of FOUND Magazine collect and publish stuff that has been uncovered by people all over the world... The collection is extensive, with people contributing oddities from around the world, and does provide voyeurism of the discarded. From the Polaroid of a roadside picnic found in an Auckland dump, to the US dollar that had printed "France no good, French go home," to the "Find of the Week" - each entry has a story behind a story."

May 12, 2004
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?

May 7, 2004
One ordinary day, you're walking down the street, and suddenly something glinting in the sun catches your eye. Maybe it's a quarter, maybe just a piece of tin foil. But maybe, just maybe, it's a treasure; a lost key, a dime-store ring, a fork flattened by years of traffic. You bend down to get a closer look, and then, when no one is looking, slip it in your pocket. And you're not alone... FOUND's contents are sometimes bizarre, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes downright hilarious, and other times a combination of all three.

April 27, 2004
The best stuff is the paper trail. There is nothing like a lost or mislaid note to prove that one person's trash is another's treasure... The third issue of FOUND was released last month, and their first book, "FOUND: The Best Lost, Tossed and Forgotten Items From Around the World," arrives in bookstores this week, containing 211 pages of new finds and 41 more pages of greatest hits from the magazine. It's ridiculously eclectic and relentlessly readable - hilarious, heartbreaking, occasionally frightening and always intriguing.

April 19, 2004
For those not acquainted with the beauty of FOUND magazine, let me briefly explain. FOUND is a printed document of items discarded and rediscovered- mostly writing, drawings, and photos. Those who have seen an issue know how addictive these fleeting glimpses into the lives of complete strangers can be- whether you're reading a misspelled shopping list or a misspelled love letter or staring at pictures that have been torn, burned or scratched out, FOUND offers you stories only partially told and allows you to piece things together yourself.

FOUND began as a pretty rough photocopied zine, and Issue 1 actually included a found object glued to each cover. It sold extremely well, catching a lot of interest, and the call for submission of found objects turned out so much great stuff that Issue 2 involved the staff upgrading to a slicker, easier to read format. The new look lost none of the character of the original and still packed in a hefty amount of modern day anthropological archaeology. Issue 3 refines the process even further, proving that the more material submitted, the better the quality of the overall material selected for the magazine.

April 7, 2004
What's more irresistible than reading a letter not meant for your eyes? Issue 3 of FOUND magazine is full of them-- letters and notes dropped or lost by their recipients and rediscovered on these pages. They're a quirky lens into the flotsam and jetsam of humanity...

March 5, 2004
The author of the letter offers her critique directly, unsentimentally. "You have to make up your mind, Mr. Dickens, 'twas either the best of times or 'twas the worst of times; it could scarcely be both," reads the scrawled handwriting.

No, it isn't an unearthed manifesto from a 19th-century literary critic. It's something a little more surreal -- one entry from among hundreds of raw, poignant and funny notes collected by the U.S.-based FOUND Magazine. Twisted breakup letters, quirky to-do-lists, revealing doodles, unusual office memos, ranting high-school missives, nobly attempted poetry -- the magazine along with a new book from its editors are filled with the artful detritus of everyday life, discovered, well, anywhere someone might have left it behind...

Spring 2004
"Polaroid film is expensive but that doesn't stop people from forgetting their pictures all over the place. Lucky for all of us, FOUND Magazine has been collecting the ones left behind for years, keeping a formidable stash of the blurry, the mysterious, the touching and the unexplainable..."

November/December 2003
2003 Utne Independent Press Award nominee! General Excellence: Zines

August 17, 2003
Artifacts are lovingly presented..."

July 14, 2003
FOUND Magazine is the ultimate reality programming, a powerful fix for thinking voyeurs..."

June 26, 2003

As evidenced by the brisk sales of FOUND, many other people find entertainment or solace in the pages... That's because the endless opportunity for individual interpretation makes FOUND a beautiful thing. The submitted items mean vastly disparate things to different people, Rothbart said.

June 13, 2003
"One of the most imaginative and entertaining magazines of the last decade..."

May 15, 2003
"Reading FOUND is like mainlining the everyday world."

May 2003
"Someday, while perusing the magazine isles of Barnes & Noble, amid the testosterone-injected super-men on the covers of sports magazines and the emaciated models enticing you from the covers of women's fashion magazines, you might also find an amateurish, grainy-paged magazine entitled, FOUND. This homegrown magazine doesn't feature frivolous Hollywood gossip, celebrities, or hyper-stylized advertisements. Nor does it provide the ultimate guide to improving your sex life/body/job/diet/health/workout. Instead, FOUND features little vignettes into the human soul."

April 3, 2003
"FOUND may just be the savior that our country, world and existence needs..."

January 2003
"A collection of items lost on the streets, photos, love letters, birthday cards, anything that suggests a story winds up in FOUND magazine. Each of the scraps of paper serves as a peek into someone else's life..."

December 12, 2002
Accumulating new entries via his own diligent scavenging and that of friends and readers (who send discoveries from all over the country), Rothbart has managed to create a fascinating and wonderfully moving collage of human emotion... FOUND is a kind of stranger's scrapbook -- a note from an angry neighbor, an obscene love letter, the scrawl on an eighth-grader's math quiz -- filled with the moments and memories of others.

December 4, 2002
"No one could pick up a copy of FOUND magazine and not be instantly, utterly fascinated. The first volume, now in its second printing, is comprised of seemingly forgotten and mislaid scraps o' lives - love notes, travelogues, shopping lists, a flyer for a multimedia presentation about the "Promised God-Man," a misspelled, threatening diatribe regarding stolen laundry detergent ("your pushing me and I push back so it better be back f-ing soon") - collected by founder Davy Rothbert and helpful cohorts and contributors. Currently on a cross-country "Nation of Millions" tour of galleries, bookstores, and cafés, FOUND's masterminds invite all who attend their events to bring new material for future issues - no doubt the weirder, the scarier, the more oddly touching, the better. "

November 11, 2002
"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..."

November 7, 2002
The pages of FOUND Magazine are trashy. But they're also silly, funny, and oddly intriguing. They confirm two truths about modern life: that our discards and debris tell more about us than we realize, and that Americans simply cannot spell... FOUND Magazine isn't trying to be profound, but it can't help it. Its longing glimpses into our private scraps of life are humbling. When gazed upon by strangers, our idiosyncrasies seem suddenly worthy of a second look. As I'm lost in the pages of FOUND Magazine, enjoying the treasure of the trash, an unsettling thought strikes me: what if one day its readers find something of mine?

November 6, 2002
"Ever wondered what to do with that love note you discovered in an old Goodwill coat? Those ancient family vacation pictures you uncovered at a garage sale? Here's a thought: Publish them. FOUND Magazine is entirely made up of its namesake: random items readers find, with explanations of how they came across them. The resulting read is sweet, embarrassing, funny, perplexing--and engrossing..."

October 31, 2002
"There's something innately attractive, as recent media exploits have proven, in looking into other people's lives. But unlike the set-up world of Web cams and reality TV, FOUND's beauty is in its realness, in what it leaves to the imagination... "

October 17, 2002
FOUND is as intriguing as it is unique, a true indulgence for the curious.

October 9, 2002
FOUND magazine is a snowballing phenomenon.

August 2002
» nominated for BEST NEW TITLE 2002 «
"A treasure trove of mysterious notes, inane travel journal entries, calls for roommates, children's drawings, and letters pieced together after having been torn to pieces. Discovered in public places, each item suggests a larger story that it's up to you to imagine..."

August 2002
"Some snapshots jog personal memories. Others offer a glimpse into someone else's life, a history that doesn't belong to us at all. FOUND Magazine posts the paper trails of strangers: Various objets trouvês- photos, grocery lists, hate letters-- expose brief but intimate moments from their lives..."

July 2002
"A group of people have dedicated some Internet real estate to random stuff that they find. What it all amounts to is a curious little peek into the lives of unknown folks... "

June 22, 2002
"FOUND Magazine is an alternately funny and touching look at the idiosyncratic nature of everyday life. At a time when reality TV has us more interested in our neighbors' lives than ever, the hyper-real magazine offers unedited, untainted, unbridled glimpses into the private and personal lives of total strangers. These notes are the very illustration of one man's trash being another man's treasure."

June 7, 2002
It's a private person's worst nightmare: a paperbound peek into resumes, classroom notes, grocery lists, diary entries and graffiti written by someone somewhere who didn't realize that his or her lost items would be found in an underground magazine.

June 5, 2002
"The magazine isn't your sleek, politically correct variety. It's coarse and sophomoric, and its photocopied pages look as if they were pasted together. Subjects range from prison life and lovestruck teens to resume-wielding job seekers. Nevertheless, e-mails, as well as classroom notes and barroom chatter are intriguing..."

May 6, 2002
FOUND Magazine Here's a website that's sure to appeal to your repressed voyeur, without any of those nasty invasion-of-privacy violations. The mystery behind these findings can generate some good stories in fertile imaginations. What's more, just looking at them and wondering about the life of their former owners seems to close the alienating gap between strangers in this world.

May 2002
"'Only connect,' said E.M. Forster, but it's getting harder and harder to tear our eyes away from the TV to do so. Maybe that's why FOUND Magazine is so compelling. The manic tumble of discarded artifacts, letters, mash notes, and paranoid ravings exhibited therein allow us unmediated access to the lives next door."

April 1, 2002
"Be careful what you drop. FOUND may find it. A compelling compilation..."

March 13, 2002
"The premise of this site is to display found notes, pictures, or objects, and to ponder the people who left them behind. The found items here range from notes left on car windshields to handwriting left on dollar bills. There are children's paintings and abandoned toys, and an abandoned audiocassette featuring homemade rap music. An original, and provocative site. "

December 31, 2001
"FOUND is an anthology of accidentally discovered missives. Call them Shakespeare, or call them litter--this collection certainly provides a window into the mystery of unknown lives... FOUND is a trash-picker's and anthropologist's dream come true."

December 4, 2001
"...FOUND [is] an amazing new magazine that prints odd items found in streets, schools, prisons, Kinko's shops and laundromats across America. It's a treasury of trash, a wonderfully weird collection of screeds, snapshots, to-do lists, leaflets, drawings, diaries and love letters. Taken together, they provide a fascinating glimpse into the wackier depths of America's collective subconscious...These found notes are fascinating because they offer a peek into the inner lives of people we'd otherwise never meet. The fact that they come to us out of context just adds to the mystery that inspires the imagination to try and fill in the blanks. "

November 23, 2001
Despite my own miserable performance as a seeker, I can heartily recommend FOUND Magazine. It's a great glimpse into other people's lives, and it's darn funny.

November 2001
"Imagine stumbling upon an opening into another person's life and you know the weird magic of FOUND Magazine."

October 2001
"Davy Rothbart probably never listened to his mother when she told him not to pick up trash. Which is good: Otherwise, he might have never started FOUND Magazine. 'FOUND stuff is like a shortcut right into someone's innermost fears and desires,' Rothbart says. 'People reveal themselves so beautifully, in bizarre and hilarious ways. The best stuff has a story to it, a real sense of someone bleakly yearning for something.'"

September 16, 2001
"Artists and writers have a long tradition of gathering inspiration from found items... The magazine features an interview with cartoonist Lynda Barry, a devout collector of found items, as well as a humorous story from The Onion and an excerpt from John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley." But it is the myriad of found items reproduced in the magazine that opens up and exposes the entire world of human emotions."

July 14, 2001
"Have you ever lost something? Then this magazine is for you. Davy Rothbart took a small idea - cataloguing objects, notes, and pictures found anywhere - and published them for the world to examine. Is this existential introspection at its best, or merely a trash collection? Bob talks to Davy Rothbart about FOUND Magazine."

June 18, 2001
This new magazine picks up where others leave off, literally. If you've ever picked up a note, a picture, or an object that someone else discarded or left behind, you should share your story with FOUND. Browse through photos or notes that were once important but lost for some reason. It provides a low-grade voyeuristic thrill that curious people can't get enough of. So go forth and find things, and when you do, tell the people at FOUND. -- Yahoo review

June 14, 2001
"Yes, it's a trashy magazine."

2001
"Once again it's time to reflect on the past year's Picks and recognize the most exceptional web sites of 2001... This new magazine picks up where others leave off, literally. If you've ever picked up a note, a picture, or an object that someone else discarded or left behind, you should share your story with FOUND. Browse through photos or notes that were once important but lost for some reason. It provides a low-grade voyeuristic thrill that curious people can't get enough of. So go forth and find things, and when you do, tell the people at FOUND."

Weekly Dig
If you don't already know and love FOUND Magazine, you may need some sort of operation. Ask your doctor whether shock therapy is right for you. Take my word for it: Those in the know find FOUND astounding, and you should, too.

Half-fetish, half-fascination, FOUND keeps you hooked with its scope. It's like people-watching, without the fear of reprisal.,