![]() Another typewritten sheet of A4 begs for witnesses and offers children new bikes if they reveal who has stolen a beloved pet. One missing dog poster is written from the perspective of the owner’s other dog. “Some of them you have to read the text to get a feel of the poetry involved,” Don goes on. Brandi, who is hard of hearing, seems haunted in her picture, her big saucer eyes staring out from the sheet of A4, looking lost long before she went missing. Very few of these posters feature photographs and when they do, they’re small, black and white, often fuzzy and unclear, with heads bowed into bowls or turned away from the camera. ![]() “The artwork – no one told these people how to do it,” muses Don. The effect is that the pet is shaking – “She’s a small, black, very shy terrier mix” writes the owner. “These people would just beat the pavement with these wonderfully drawn things,” Don says, “It’s like bluegrass music, it’s an American artform.” One of his favourite posters features a dog drawn with motion lines around its legs, body, and head. Don enthusiastically shows me his flyers for over an hour I’d guess he has at least a hundred. Don’t worry, it’s a perfectly legal liquid – on most of the 35 planets of the galactic federation anyway.” For this reason, I can’t tell you the kind of fact that I might tell you now – like exactly how many posters Don has in his collection. It’s difficult to get straightforward answers from Don, who says things like: “Hold on a second, let me imbibe a liquid. The 67-year-old punk has so much pizzazz that I feel like a vacuum of fun sitting digitally across from him, a square inside a square. “He doesn’t need it anymore,” Don says, “He’s dead.” (He isn’t.) He jokes that he “stole” his look from Electric Light Orchestra’s Roy Wood. The oldest posters in his collection were drawn almost half a century ago.ĭon greets me on Zoom with long silver hair, blue-tinted hippy sunglasses and a magnificently fulsome moustache and beard. Although he admits it’s “morally questionable”, he began taking the posters, collecting them and storing them in milk crates around his home. ![]() He was touched by the “folk art” of missing posters – the hand-drawn dogs and the poetic pleas meticulously crafted in a time before computers and printers were household goods. In 1978, Don moved from Hollywood Boulevard to a more suburban area in West Hollywood and he started noticing the flyers littering the lampposts and trees. Don is an LA-based musician who rose to fame as the drummer of the iconic 70s punk band Germs – he is also possibly the world’s only collector of lost pets. I know because of the unusual, surely one-of-a-kind collection of Don Bolles, born Jimmy Michael Giorsetti, also known professionally as Kitten Sparkles. I should not know about Diana and her dog – I was born 5,256 miles away around two decades later. ![]() She – or someone close to her – drew and coloured in the puppy, and as a finishing touch sketched a speech bubble coming out of his mouth. At home, Diana got out some green and red marker pens to make a missing poster she offered a “BIG REWARD” for Pluto’s safe return. Pluto was a Whippet – “brown and friendly” – and Diana was walking him by Griffith Observatory in LA when he ran away. Towards the end of July in the year 1970-something, a woman named Diana lost her three-month-old dog.
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