the archive

lost and frowned

Cracked and patched concrete sidewalk seen from directly above in flat grey daylight

Unclaimed items from the coat check of the apocalypse — featuring found slides, comics, the infamous name-that-sidewalk contest, and more.

That sentence sat at the top of this publication for twelve years and was never once revised. It was accurate when it was written and it is accurate now, which is more than most statements of purpose manage.

Lost and Frowned was a small independent humour magazine, published on the web out of New York, on a yellow background, in the browser's default serif, assembled by hand from tables and hand-drawn tiles by people with no interest in learning a better way to do it. It ran for roughly a decade and a half and then it stopped. Nothing here is being updated. Nothing here takes entries. The coat check is closed and this is the archive.

A note from the editors

We were never a large operation. At its fullest the magazine consisted of two regular columns, three runs of comics, one monthly contest, one webcam that did not move, and a charitable institution devoted to the welfare of discarded photographic slides. Readers arrived by way of other people's link lists, which was the transport system of the period, and stayed for whichever of the nine tiles on this page looked least explicable.

The tiles are still here. Each was drawn a single pixel at a time, and each was considerably less informative than we believed at the time. What follows is a plain description of what sits behind them, in the order we would have given it to a stranger who asked.

The columns

Pat Freestone's head was the flagship and the longest-running thing we ever published. Pat is an invention: forty-two years old, night assistant manager of an independent video store, living alone, convinced the world is waiting on his opinions and faintly wounded that it has not said so. He wrote in dated entries, most recent first, and signed off each one with a different valediction of his own devising. He was never in on the joke. That was the arrangement.

The back catalogue is indexed at the Pat Freestone Archives, where the individual runs live. Three are worth naming here. The Big Screen Countdown is the week-long five-to-one list that started the column and produced our first genuine reader complaint, which Pat had framed. The Clicky Archives is the longest single thing he ever wrote: the record of the months in which he acquired a roommate, concluded the roommate had been raised by termites in a crawl space, and appointed himself his tutor. Pat's Lists collects the countdown format as it was applied to subjects that could not support it.

Ask Eight-Ball Willis ran opposite him for years. Eight-Ball is also an invention: an advice columnist writing from a maximum-security penitentiary, where he is serving three concurrent life sentences and is well known on his cellblock for giving good advice. The joke, such as it is, is that the advice is good. Readers wrote in under alliterative pseudonyms and were answered patiently, at length, and entirely without irony.

The Found Slide Foundation

For several years this magazine operated a charitable foundation. Its purpose was the rescue, cataloguing and lifelong care of 35mm colour transparencies found on pavements, in gutters, in the unsorted boxes at junk sales, and on one occasion inside a discarded refrigerator. The Foundation's gallery holds the collection as it stood, catalogue numbers and all, every slide with the short caption we wrote for it. Our pledge that no slide would be destroyed was made in earnest and was never broken.

How the collection started is the earlier index page, kept separately because it explains the founding and because a number of people linked to it before the gallery existed. It is the shorter of the two and the sadder.

The comics, and the webcam

Terrible Tales was three runs of single-panel strips, introduced then and now with the instruction to click on a picture to see a terrible tale. They were drawn in marker on paper, scanned badly, and are reproduced here at the size they were published, which is small.

Sme-cam was our live webcam, broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, from a sofa occupied by two cats named Cheese and Sme. It was one photograph. It never updated. We described it as live for eleven years and not one reader wrote in to complain, which we took, and still take, as a verdict on the medium rather than on us.

Name That Sidewalk

Seven times we photographed an anonymous stretch of pavement from directly overhead, published the picture with a clue, and invited the community of the World Wide Web to identify it. Seven times somebody did. The results archive records all seven outcomes and the prizes awarded for them. How it was played sets out the rules as they stood, in the past tense, because the contest is finished. The fine print is the terms and conditions, which reached some fifty numbered items and are, by a comfortable margin, the most widely read thing we ever published.

Elsewhere

Our old links page pointed at seven sites we admired. All seven are now dead or parked, which is a tidier ending than most publications get. The page that replaced it lists the archives, libraries and museums that hold the sort of material this magazine spent fifteen years picking up off the ground, with an honest note on each about what is actually there.

About this archive

A publication that exists only on the web leaves no bound volume behind. It leaves a domain name, which lapses, and a set of files, which do not outlive their host. What survives instead is whatever a web archive happened to capture on a given afternoon. The Internet Archive holds several hundred captures of this site, and the Library of Congress web archiving programme exists because that is now the ordinary way anything published online is kept at all.

This archive was assembled from those captures. The columns are restored as they were written. The contests are recorded as finished. Real people who appeared here are not named, the addresses we once printed are gone, and there is nobody at the other end of them in any case, and has not been for years.

It is a yellow page with nine drawings on it. It was always going to end up somewhere like this.

The nine doors

The front page of this magazine was nine hand-drawn buttons in a grid, and nothing else. Here they are again.