80pp
7” x 9”
Perfect-bound paperback with flaps and foil-stamped cover
Archival clippings from the Los Angeles Free Press
Selections and essay by Sam Sweet
Design by Ella Gold

The Los Angeles Free Press was the first and largest of the counterculture newspapers that sprouted in the late 1960s. The paper grew in tandem with a generation of teenage runaways. They treated the back pages as a test plot for uncensored desires. In turn, desperate parents embedded messages among ads for marijuana seeds, group sex, and crash pads, hoping to be seen by the children who had abandoned them.

This publication collects a selection of columns in which those embedded notes appeared. The “Please Come Home” messages surfaced for a period of years beginning around 1966 before tapering off after 1974. At the Freep’s zenith, half a million eyes scanned these pages, but there’s no telling how many picked up the hidden threads within. We are left neither with tales of heartwarming reunions nor unspeakable disappearances. Only the pages remain.

No one who participated in the classifieds knew they would be saved, let alone searchable. Like lotto tickets and racing forms, they were a purely ephemeral document excluded from posterity. Thus, they are essential. Each page is a microcosm of its moment. Together, they constitute the sedimentary record of a period that headlines could never accurately apprehend.