Birth of an Empire

I'm not a shiller. We here at Skylight don't do shillin', spread buzz, do mouthpieces or are plants. We pretty much only endorse stuff that we believe in, and/or like. This affords us a great deal of latitude in helping to promote artists and writer that may not necessarily have an outlet or venue to show their works to the general public. Some examples include Sad Animals by Adam Meuse (over 1,200 copies sold), My Life in Heavy Metal by Steve Almond (over 550 sold), Controlled Burn by Scott Wolven (over 230 sold) and on, and on the list goes. We have dozens of examples of stuff like this: a book, or zine that would never see the light of day at a bigger, corporate bookstore but sells extraordinarily well here at Skylight.

One of the greatest examples of this is Found magazine. Created by Davy Rothbart in 2001, what began as a magazine about stuff found on the ground has grown into an entire publishing empire. Seriously! 10 years ago I received a cold call from Davy asking if we would be interested in carrying his magazine. I said yes and a friendship was born. (It also helped that his magazine sold phenomenally well)

One decade later Davy has now published 7 issues of Found magazine, 3 issues of Dirty Found, 3 Found books, 1 book of short stories, 1 book of Found polaroids, and 1 book of found photographs. Not only that but Davy has now gone on to have an equally successful writing career having been published in GQ, the Believer and Slam magazine. He's also been a featured guest on the popular radio program, This American Life. And there was a fictionalized version of life made into a movie. I'm not saying that Skylight was a direct reason for all of this but it is pretty neat to have gotten in on the groundfloor.

Davy has more films coming out in the future including one that is a documentary about his love life called My Heart is an Idiot. It's premiering this Thursday at the Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd, in Echo Park. Doors open at 8, show starts soon thereafter. Get your tickets today! Davy is a super cool guy and I promise that he will buy you a drink if you go up to him and say, "Kevin from Skylight said you'd buy me a drink if I showed up."*

*guarantee of drink is not guaranteed.