FINDERS KEEPER.(magazine Found publishes writings that are found)

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.

Rothbart, who is twenty-seven, lives with his parents in Ann Arbor, Michigan. About once a year, he puts out an issue of Found; the rest of the time he is usually writing short stories, editing a documentary film about life in inner-city Washington, D.C., or working on a rap album. At the moment, he is driving around the country in a rented Mitsubishi Galant, visiting bookstores and coffeehouses in fifty cities to meet his subscribers and appraise their finds, like a one-man "Antiques Roadshow." The best material will end up in the Found Archives, also known as his parents' basement.

Last week, Rothbart was in New York, and he spent an afternoon rummaging near Tompkins Square Park. A friendly, red-haired man with green eyes and tapered sideburns that meet under his jaw, forming a chin strap of hair, he was wearing lime-green pants from an Albuquerque thrift store and a red sweatshirt with "Ebony Ladies" stencilled on the back (a girl in St. Louis found it and had given it to him). He carried a found Book-of-the-Month Club tote bag stuffed with booty. The over-all effect was of a hobo Santa. In Brooklyn, he'd been presented with a castoff Dunkin' Donuts nametag that said only "Name"; in Providence, a discarded valentine scrawled in pencil ("Roses are Red / Violets are Blue / I'm in love but / Not with You!!!"); in Traverse City, Michigan, a forsaken lamprey in a jar of formaldehyde, with a Post-It note on the lid saying, "Flaky and self-conscious."

As Rothbart walked through the park, his eyes scanned every bush and trash can, flicking past dozens of menus, flyers, paper plates, movie stubs, parking tickets, and A.T.M. receipts. He was looking for handwriting--the stamp of the personal. "I wanted to try this area because my mom used to live here, in the sixties," he said. "Also, there are a lot of schools near ...