Community Calendar . . . Maze! Toy! Found Magazine .. 36 38 Found Magazine founder and editor Davy Rothbart peeks into real-life people's live-a-day lives KAREN SCHWARTZ Special to the Jewish News Ann Arbor D avy Rothbart receives five to 10 letters a week from people around the world he has never met. They're sending him submissions for his publication, Found Magazine, a compilation of notes, letters and photographs dis- covered by the wayside and picked up by passersby who deemed them meaningful. Accepting everything from love notes to postcards and to-do lists, Ann Arbor native Rothbart, 28, has received "finds" from people as young as 6 and as old as 96, who write in to contribute to the project. Entries include the object plus information about where and often how it was found. Motivated by an emotional note addressed to "Mario" he found on his windshield late one night, Rothbart decided to make the finds he had been collecting since childhood into a magazine. He said he had no idea the project would grow so much. More than 25,000 copies of each edition have currently been sold. "I spent three nights slapping together all the finds I'd collected and I put together Issue One. I didn't have any grand plans for this," he said. He set out to make 50 copies but wound up making 800 because of the positive feedback he received from a cousin and a man working at Kinko's when they went to make the copies. He sold 100 copies right away, then left for a previously planned trip to Honduras and came home to a big sur- prise. "When I came back six weeks later, all 800 copies were sold. I just couldn't believe it," Rothbart said. "I was like, 'Well, I guess we've got to print more,' and it just keeps going. The more copies that get out there, the more people who end up sending stuff in." He said he was excited to discover so many other people shared his pas- sion, intrigued by the possibility of peeking into other people's private moments. "I noticed people would have their prize find hanging on their fridge, some photo or note, and it seemed like a shame that only the people who trooped through the kitchen would get to see that stuff. So making a maga- zine seemed like a natural way for everyone to share their findings with everyone else." Rothbart said he feels it's natural, in a society where "we are surrounded by strangers all the time," for people to take an interest in the lives of oth- ers. In fact, he said he is the most intrigued by finds that have the most sense of a story. One that sticks in his mind is a letter written by a boy in Erie, Pa., to his father, who lives in Arizona. The letter talks about how the boy wants to move in with his father, the CDs he would bring him and the grill they could get so he could cook them a buffet. "Important, Dad," the boy writes, "I'm gonna send you some stamps so you can write me back, and I'm gonna give you a calling card so you can FOUND on page 32 7/18 2003 31