Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World

Recycling

In the case of Found magazine, the well-worn adage "one man's trash is another man's treasure," might better be reformulated as "one man's trash is another man's book deal." 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. Though Rothbart and his co-editor Jason Bitner both profess that they have been collectors for some time, it took one particular find to spur Davy into creating Found. A scrawled note on the windshield of his car read: "Mario, I fucking hate you. You said you had to work then why's your car here at her place?? You're a fucking liar. I hate you. I fucking hate you. Amber. PS Page me later."

After three issues, Rothbart was offered a deal with Simon and Schuster to create a book, a full-length compendium of the same kind of materials that garnered thousands of fans. The book is like the kinder, more empathetic cousin of the reality programming phenomenon. Sure, it has the undeniable voyeuristic thrill of seeing things not intended for our eyes, digging through a person's trash, finding their darkest secrets that they thought they had disposed off by bringing the garbage to the curb. It has sex, heartbreak, the occasional flash of flesh, anger, bitterness, humor, and, yes, even tales of incest. (One spectacularly bizarre find printed in the book is a letter reading, in part, "Dear Ron, The longer I think about what I'm doing the sicker I feel. Ron, I'm sorry but I don't think that we should continue to have a relationship together, at least not as a couple. I love you but things have not been the same since we found out that we were related ...")

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.

The aesthetics of Found are meant to remind us of this at every turn, constantly highlighting the authenticity of what is collected within. Notes scrawled on wrinkled tattered paper are printed with every crease and tear intact. The pages look like grainy black and white Xerox copies, images and notes collaged haphazardly over each other, attached with pieces of visible tape. Certainly this low-fi approach seems to appeal to their intended audience, generally a younger, media-saturated crowd who have grown increasingly, and probably rightfully, skeptical about the veracity of daily television and web fare.

It is no surprise that, at this point, reality programming hardly documents reality at all but stages a performance for the viewer. Most shows have their cast monitored 24 hours a day — their lives edited down to the most exciting 22 minutes. They are cut off from the outside world, allowing more time for bickering, nudity, and conflict. These manipulations sometimes rise to the surface: In scenes that are meant to be mere moments apart, a character will seemingly instantaneously switch shirts or perm her hair. In the end, these manipulations prevent people from speaking for themselves and us from believing them. What we are seeing is not authentic, let alone reality. 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. Within the span of a few pages, one can find a burnt tooth brush found in the ruins of Waco, a ransom note from a grade-schooler holding another child's binder hostage for $3.50, and a poster directed towards building residents, asking them to lock the front door in order to "prevent unauthorized people from entering the building and defecating in the washing machine."

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. One example is this note that the finder said he had been stepping over for a full week before finally stopping to pick it up: "To whoever finds this I hope your life is perfect. My father and stepmom was killed while I was in this house. My grandma aunt and uncle all turned their back on me. My dream is to become a modle (sic) someday I hope. Good luck to you and your dreams. A stranger, Monique."

For the finders and fans of Found, the act of finding and reading these scraps seems almost therapeutic. Rothbart explains it like this: "When you find and read these notes you have the very particular thrill of touching people who you haven't met but who maybe are experiencing the same things as you even if they use different language to communicate it." Though this may seem a bit overwrought, it is difficult to remain unmoved by a series of letters one man found in his great-grandmothers attic, written by Jewish relatives from the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. Since all correspondence was monitored by SS guards to ensure that it didn't contain a hint of the brutal truth, the letters are strained in their forced contentedness: "The air is very good here; Theresienstadt lies elevated. We have nice sun and my job gets me out into the air frequently." Found also includes a spread of papers that fluttered down from the upper floors of the WTC on September 11; an accounts payable invoice for computers sent to the 92nd floor is tattered and burned at the edges.

But these examples represent the extremes, and, of course, part of the reason that reality television is so highly produced and edited is that watching regular people go about their daily routine isn't all that interesting, truthful though it may be. Along with the genuinely intriguing finds, much of Found consists of the mundane things that constitute our actual lives, and at 250 pages, it feels too long by a third. There are pages of missing pet flyers, notes left on parked cars regarding unceasing car alarms or poor parallel parking jobs, and grocery lists. Even Bitner admits that the finds that are submitted can get repetitive, "We will get one shopping list that says 'frozen pizza, cheese, beer' and then the next will say 'frozen pizza, Makers Mark, sour cream.'" Sometimes, in reality, the banal is just the banal.

• Read more about this book

Try four weeks of the New Republic Digital absolutely free For nearly 90 years, the New Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous examination of American politics, foreign policy, and culture. Today, we're proud to offer a faster, easier, and more economical way to enjoy the magazine — TNR Digital. Subscribe today and we'll give you 4 weeks absolutely free. That's less than 36 cents/week for every word of content available in the print version, a downloadable replica of the print magazine, and an array of special online-only features! Click here to sign up.