The Internet has made most forms of paper communication obsolete, but there’s at least one as important as ever: lost-and-found pet notices, which are still most effective tacked to a telephone pole. Illustrator Ian Phillips collects these melancholy artifacts, and Princeton Architectural Press this month released a 15th anniversary edition of his book, “Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters From Around the World.”
The book features some of the most notable examples from Phillips’s collection, which he estimates contains more than 1,500 posters. He says he first started paying attention to the genre when his roommate’s cat went missing. “I just became fascinated with the little details that people would choose to put on the poster,” Phillips says. “Sometimes you could tell just how desperate they were.”
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Phillips started placing advertisements in zines, asking people to send him posters they came across. In the late 1990s, he was receiving one to two each day, mostly from North America, where pets are more precious than they are in other parts of the world. “In the Netherlands, someone wrote to me saying you’ll never get a Dutch poster because when people lose their pets there, they just go out and get a new one,” he says. (Phillips says he later received a poster from the Netherlands.)
Besides dogs and cats, Phillips has “lost” posters for a turtle, a ferret, a rat named “Poison,” and one for a bunny rabbit that says “alive or dead” in French. The most desperate posters, he notes, appear to be written very quickly and “talk about how their animal needs its medication.”
Phillips’s immersion in lost-and-found pet posters has also led him to develop a list of tips for designing effective posters, which he includes in the back of his book. He counsels that it’s better to include a photograph than a drawing; he cautions against including the pet’s name because it could allow a pet thief to gain the animal’s confidence; and, he recommends offering a reward but withholding the amount to weed out potential scammers. Still, even a well-designed poster faces long odds — Phillips writes in his book that “recovery rates are dismal.” Sadly, he estimates that 90 percent of lost cats and dogs are never found.
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Kevin Hartnett is a writer in South Carolina. He can be reached at kshartnett18@gmail.com.