Review: Abe’s Penny

Given the UK’s current postal strike, it seems the perfect time to talk about Abe’s Penny.

Calling itself “A Micro Magazine”, each monthly issue arrives in your letterbox divided into four postcards, one each week. A collaboration between different photographers and writers each time, the texts are short, the images unexpected and the delivery method engaging.

I’ve now received four ‘issues’ (1.4-1.7), and here’s what I think.

Abe’s Penny seems to be self-consciously a literary magazine. The first postcard I received contained a cryptic message that must have confused my mailman:

The issue continued in this haunting, poetic vein, the matching images also echoing of strange nostalgia.

I enjoyed collecting each one alongside the bills and junk mail that makes up 90% of our daily paperload in these giddy, email days. It felt like a good start.

The next issue played with the notion of writing and receiving postcards – written to the people ‘in’ my building by a noisy neighbour who ran his own in-house music festivals. A cute idea, but these didn’t work so well – the images weren’t that special, and didn’t show any of the destruction hinted at in the messages. The sequence didn’t really engage me, and though I liked the touch of each being hand-signed, it didn’t make narrative sense for the rest of it to be printed in Helvetica, particularly as the address was hand-written.

The following issue was a return to the lyrical, each part before the last cutting off mid-sentence, a lovely exercise in delayed poetry – though it only really worked if you remembered to keep the back issues handy.

I was particularly delighted that one arrived in a little plastic bag, mangled in the postal process – a wonderfully physical reminder of the medium.

Now I’m receiving weekly updates containing a short story about someone’s family, and although I still like the moment of unexpected lyricism, I can’t help wishing that almost every aspect of the medium was being used a little more adventurously. Some are being overlooked altogether.

The choice of images on the stamps, for instance, seems to be unrelated to the content (or am I missing something? For the record, it’s almost always a polar bear, sometimes a Tiffany lamp and a kiwi fruit).

The design of the card doesn’t take into account the way that the US postal service marks postcards with small black lines on the back, and cancels the stamp with wavy lines. Could something unexpected be done with this?

And, as with most literary magazines, I find myself wanting the medium to demand more of me as a reader, to match fiction with non-fiction in a meaningful way – why not team up a scientist and an infographer one issue? Or run an interview issue? Could one issue actually deconstruct the postal service itself? And why stick with the same typography all the time? Why are virtually all the images landscape? Why doesn’t a story sometimes run onto the front of the card as well, and blur with the image rather than keeping them separate all the time?

In summary then, I love the bite-sizeness of it, the delivery method, the possibilities. I’m pleased to get it in my mailbox. So far, however, I’m not being surprised enough with what I receive. I love the concept, I like the idea – but it’s already feeling a bit same-y, just three stories in. More surprises, more imaginative commissions and a little more playfulness with the medium itself would make a fickle man like me much happier with the result.