"Second Hand Stories" is the most recent of several ventures that attempt to explore the search for ourselves through the things of others. There is the Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata in Austin, Texas, a self-described "meditation on the theme of loss and gain" in the form of a dime museum of human minutiae, whose curators hope their visitors will go on to see "the city dump, a vast archive" as they do. There is Other People's Stories, a Web site that says it is "dedicated to the time-honored tradition of stealing other people's material" but that in fact reinforces the realization that other people's stories are often our own.

But the project that truly shares the fundamental aspects of "Second Hand Stories" is Found magazine. Found creates a sort of living anthropology through discarded notes, photos, letters, fliers, journals, drawings, audiotapes and the occasional résumé. Its creator, Davy Rothbart, who is really more of a curator than an editor -- compiling these untouchables of the secondhand hierarchy into a high-end cut-and-paste zine -- believes that finding is a noble act. A noble act in the narrative rather than environmental sense (although, like "Second Hand Stories," it is what you might call passively environmental) because it gives new life to what has been discarded.

Freyer, of "Second Hand Stories," says, "I'm more interested by the things that are passed over, to see the things that used to be valued." That is precisely the operating principle of Found.

"I think it's a fundamental curiosity we have about other people's lives," says Rothbart. "We're surrounded by strangers all the time, on the bus, walking across the street." And what they dispose of creates a sort of familiarity. "What we end up finding out a lot of the time," he concludes, "is that people who are clearly leading different kinds of lives are still experiencing the same basic emotions."

The sheer volume of orphaned paper, not unlike the offerings of a flea market, can be overwhelming. In both cases selection is based on what Wilcha calls the "personal, curatorial impulse" that separates the treasures from the trash. To Rothbart, what makes something a prize find is the unexpected human touch.

Like a letter from a wife to her husband, enumerating her reasons for wanting a divorce, penned on an aborted grocery list with only one item -- coffee filters -- written at the top. "Coffee filters" is what makes it a find. A seemingly benign phrase on its own, but as a header to this particular note it raises endless possibilities. Was there something catalytic about coffee filters at that time in the author's marriage? Or was there something else, something entirely unrelated to coffee filters that struck her just after she'd started the list, prompting the indictment? Was it a rough draft of the argument eventually presented to her husband or merely a private act of catharsis, composed only to be thrown away?

Ah, coffee filters! Ah, humanity!

Here is a point of entry into the life of a stranger, simultaneously a distillation of a basic human experience and a never-ending choose-your-own-adventure story. "I end up feeling really attached to the people whose notes I've found," admits Rothbart. "Sometimes I wonder why these people mean so much to me, but really in some ways they're my own creations." Again, what could be seen as voyeurism becomes instead self-reflection.

Wilcha and Freyer found this in their travels as they amassed used answering machines, with tapes of incoming and outgoing messages still intact. "There is an element of voyeurism in all that," Wilcha admits. "There are traces of people's lives that are left behind, and you project an incredible story onto all that stuff." But the story inevitably reflects more on the finder than the find.

Beyond that, there is the desire to be a source of mystery oneself. Don't we all, at times, feel lost and want to be found? Perhaps by participating in this cycle of lost and found, of buying and selling things that others have owned, we perpetuate the possibility of anonymously becoming someone else's story.

The journey has become as integral to Found as it is to "Second Hand Stories." Rothbart regularly takes his collection on an ad hoc tour of cities across the country, both to share what he's found with live audiences that reach beyond the magazine's readership and to gather new material. "Everywhere I go now, people bring me found stuff," he says. "It's really exciting that so many people share my fascination with other people's lives and that sort of curiosity."

Rothbart, Wilcha and Freyer all talk about discovering communities they didn't know existed before their undertakings with pre-owned objects. Both "Second Hand Stories" and Found take a solitary act and make it a communal experience. At the end of their road trip in Texas, Wilcha and Freyer threw open the ambulance doors and held a fire sale of everything they had gathered along the way. This was their intention all along.

"We made a commitment to get rid of everything that we acquired," says Freyer. It was another opportunity to make connections. "The secondhand economy is based on this direct exchange," says Freyer, who, with Wilcha, interviewed each of their buyers in the cab of the ambulance about their purchases. "When you go into a mall, the people that are selling things have no relationship whatsoever to what they're selling."

But with secondhand stuff, connection is inevitable for both the buyer and the seller. "We were both drawn to this thing, so it's a point of connection. But there was something that we shared that was above and beyond the object," says Freyer, who maintains that the people were always more interesting than the objects.

Rothbart's fascination with things left behind goes back to childhood, but it wasn't until 2001, when he was living in Chicago, that he decided to produce Found. The impetus was a kiss-off note left on the windshield of his car, berating someone named Mario for being parked in front of "HER place" when he claimed to be at work. The author signs off with a series of dismissive expletives, but then succumbs to contrary feelings in the postscript: "Page me later."

The note always gets a big laugh on Rothbart's Found tours. This doesn't necessarily reflect schadenfreude toward Mario and his aggrieved lover, but perhaps more the intractable Everyman quality of heartbreak. "To me, what's funniest is when we recognize ourselves in the notes," Rothbart says.

Which is to say that we are what we find.

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