Lost and Found II

Following up on a recent post on found objects, here are some other cool lost things found at the library. Ian Phillips’s Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters is loaded with notices of missing dogs, cats, bunnies, birds (including several identically-described cockatoos), and ferrets in photographs or drawings, dashed off in desperation or lovingly detailed by a child’s hand, together with heartfelt, prayerful appeals to someone – anyone – that the lost family member will be found. Amidst the heart-rending hope (“Lost Female Dog. Children Crying”) there are moments of hilarity (“Turtle. Find Him.”) and some serious wierdness, like the sign shown here.

Yet more voyeuristic delights are to be found in Other People’s Love Letters, by Bill Shapiro. Picked up in estate sales, flea markets and elsewhere, these deeply personal missives were never intended for public consumption. Here are pet names and secret languages, young love and settled affection, running the gamut of emotion on both sides of that thin line between love and hate, and giving voice to sentiments that are embarrassing, amusing and moving, sometimes all at once. I’m not given to fits of Luddite nostalgia, but this is something we may be losing in the age of email and chat, and seeing these made me want to revisit (and maybe burn) some old boxes of mash notes I have in the basement. Finally there are David Nadelberg’s Mortified: Real Words, Real People, Real Pathetic, and Mortified: Love is a Battlefield, which gather the most deliciously agonizing awkwardness of High School reflected in letters, journals, and some truly awe inspiring flights of adolescent fancy, interspersed with abashed and amused comments from the contributors adult selves. (Check out Salon of Shame, our own homegrown version of Nadelberg’s justly infamous live readings). Trinie Dalton has assembled a sort of fantasia made out of these same painfully raw materials in Dear New Girl, or Whatever Your Name Is, in which several talented artists interpret, illustrate and embellish a collection of notes confiscated by Dalton in her work as a substitute teacher, creating little masterpieces of offhand cruelty and love. All of these are the sorts of books that one picks up out of idle curiosity, and winds up not putting down until the last page is turned, make terrific gifts for readers and non-readers on your list, and great items to pass around during the holidays.