April 6, 2009: "Impressive Eagle"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We’ve always liked the bold reverse design of this issue and figured it would make an interesting ad.

Also, it was one of our infrequent opportunities to highlight the reverse of a coin, which we think is important to ‘mix it up’ occasionally.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We knew we were going with this idea, but frankly we had more difficulty than usual with the punctuation.

The question centered on how to make ‘American Numismatics’ possessive, which we briefly tried to avoid altogether with "Is this the most impressive eagle in American numismatics?"

That seemed too easy, though, so we decided to stick our head directly into the proverbial lion’s mouth and go with the final version (figuring that if we were wrong it would spur some potentially fruitful new contacts from coin collecting English teachers).

But we believe the final version is correct.