June 23, 2008: "Pleaded with Success"

Author:
D. Wnuck

Concept:
In our continuing effort to balance our light-hearted approach with some serious numismatics, we thought we were due (perhaps overdue) for a more scholarly ad. So we delved into the history books and rooted out the best quote we could find to explain who William Pitt was. So who was William Pitt?

A British Statesman perhaps best known for arguing (with success!) on behalf of the colonists to repeal the stamp act (a system of tariffs imposed on the colonists by England). Hence the ‘Restorer of Commerce’ and ‘No Stamps’ legends seen on this token.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
Our lone alternative wasn’t quite as weighty and serious as the eventual winner: "Restorer. R-E-S-T-O-R-E-R!" was a reference to the fact that the die engraver evidently misspelled RESTORER in the obverse legend, then sneakily tried to squeeze in a tiny last R as if no one would notice.

And while that might have been pretty clever thing to highlight, we didn’t think that CW readers (who might not be familiar with this issue at all) would be able to see that tiny R in our quarter page ad, and thus wouldn’t understand what in the heck we were talking about.

Not to mention that it wasn’t the serious approach we wanted this week.