November 3, 2008: "We Pluck"

Author:
C. Sloan

Concept:
The story with this coin is that it is 1) An original example of New Orleans’ gold (unlike most of the surviving examples), and 2) That is the only way we buy them (which means we don’t buy very many).

We just needed a really catchy way to communicate that, and, fortunately for us, our customer came through with another winning idea.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
There were many options, but the best alternative seemed to center around the fact that noted gold specialist Doug Winter stated in his book that of the 80 – 90 examples known of this issue, not more than a dozen or so original, uncleaned, uncorrupted examples remain. Which led to this idea:

“One of the Dirty Dozen (the 12 original examples left).”

And while we thought that was undeniably catchy, we felt that it might be hard for our readers to understand and really required more explanation than we had room to include. Plus we didn’t want to be seen as making hard-to-prove claims about the rarity of the coin or otherwise hyping our inventory (a CRO-taboo).

So we went with the easier to follow, less controversial and more fun ‘Pluck’ concept.