We first discovered D.C.-area artist Frank Warren’s PostSecret project at the 2004 Artomatic exhibit. The artist was handing out blank postcards addressed to a P.O. box, encouraging visitors to write a secret on the card and drop them in the mail. As the replies came in he would display the replies — ranging from whimsical to disturbing — at the exhibit.

After the close of Artomatic the project kept growing: the City Paper began printing one of Warren’s cards in each issue, in January Warren launched a web site to display the cards he continued to receive, and in February Georgetown’s Anne C. Fisher Gallery displayed a selection of the cards. In recent months we had lost sight of the project, only to receive a surprising announcement in our inbox over the weekend: Warren will be publishing a collection of the cards in a book published by Regan Books to come out December 1. Furthermore, we were surprised to discover Warren’s simple Blogspot site is now the second most discussed blog in Technorati’s index with over 26,000 inbound links. The book is currently listed for $16.47 on Amazon, which we think is quite a steal since it will be a hardbound, 288-page volume.

Warren’s quirky, participatory project reminds us of Found Magazine, a magazine that prints found paper ephemera, and also the Illegal Art collective, who have published a collection of anonymous suggestions collected in New York.