August 11, 2008: "How Long Will You Own It?"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
Sure, the coin is a knockout, and the pedigree is cool, but we thought it especially interesting that the Garrett’s acquisition date was printed in the 1976 catalog in which this coin was last sold, enabling us to see that they owned it for exactly 94 years.

And we figured that highlighting this fact in the form of a question would engage the reader in a provocative way, making you start to think about how long your own collection would stay together.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
All of our ideas focused on this same theme, with some minor changes in emphasis.

Our first effort was the most literal “Purchased by T. Harrison Garrett in 1882.” but that seemed awfully dry, and wasn’t something that the reader could relate to.

Which led us to versions of the final concept, including “It resided in the Garrett Collection for a century – How long will you own it?" and then "It resided in the Garrett Collection for 9 decades – How long will you own it?".

Somehow those sounded stuffy to me, so we went with the ’94 years’ version instead.