Lost kitty Johnny from Washington, USA, in ‘Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World’ by Ian Phillips (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)
Taped around telephone poles and pinned to message boards, the homemade missing pet poster is an enduring form of public communication in an era when just about every other type of transmission is going digital. This month the Princeton Architectural Press has reissued a compendium of the bespoke pleas for help, Ian Phillips’s Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World, in honor of its 15th anniversary.
Cover of the 15th-anniversary reissue of ‘Lost’ by Ian Phillips (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press) (click to enlarge)
Sourced from the hundreds of posters the Canadian artist collected over two decades, Lost is a compact tribute to these missives of animal companions gone astray. “Each one is a heartbreaking story about love, loss, and friendship, illustrated with folksy artwork,” Phillips writes in an introduction. “Though they’re cheaply made and quickly destroyed, pet owners pour their hearts into them, exposing deep emotions to an unknown telephone-pole audience.” The book is divided by pet type — cats being by far the most numerous wanderers, unsurprisingly — and on every spread, opposite the posters, is a flip drawing that goes throughout the book, starting with a running dog who is joined by a cat and bird as you reach each new section.
Selection of the flip drawing in ‘Lost’ by Ian Phillips (GIF by the author for Hyperallergic)
“Lost Female Dog; Children Crying,” one among the over 100 posters in the book laments, while a speech bubble drawn above an illustration of a striped cat asks “Where the hell am I?” Xeroxed, collaged, and hand drawn, none of them were intended as art, but taken together they form an archive of a persistent genre of DIY design. Phillips collected many of the posters himself, and when he started a zine of them in the 1990s they began to pour in from all over the world. A map in the book plots the missing dogs, cats, ferrets, birds, and even cows around the globe. And before you start wringing your hands about the collecting having potentially harmed the lost pet search, know that Phillips replaces each one he takes down with 10 copies.
Even assembled in one long litany, each poster is highly personal and full of love for its lost creature, whether it’s a rat named Poison or “an old and toothless, orange Persian with a dandriff [sic] problem and a flat face.”
Pages from ‘Lost’ by Ian Phillips (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
Pages from ‘Lost’ by Ian Phillips (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
“M’avez-vous vu?” (“Have you seen me?”) from Quebeca, Canada, in ‘Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World’ by Ian Phillips (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)
“Lost Dog” poster from British Columbia, Canada, in ‘Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World’ by Ian Phillips (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)
“Lost/Stolen Whippet/Greyhound” poster from California, in ‘Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World’ by Ian Phillips (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)
Lost cat poster from Switzerland, in ‘Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World’ by Ian Phillips (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)
A poster for a dog named Joan from Japan, in ‘Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World’ by Ian Phillips (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)
Missing poster for a cat named Grizzabella from Australia, in ‘Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World’ by Ian Phillips (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)
A poster for a rabbit wanted “vivant ou mort” (“dead or alive”) from France, in ‘Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World’ by Ian Phillips (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)
“Found: Lost Ferret” from Ontario, Canada, in ‘Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World’ by Ian Phillips (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)
“Ginger has been found!” from Ontario, Canada, in ‘Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World’ by Ian Phillips (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)
Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World by Ian Phillips is available from Princeton Architectural Press.
