August 30, 2010: "Drunken Die Cutter"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
This ‘teaser’ concept is a new one for us, whereby we figured we’d introduce an idea but only give the reader the ‘payoff’ if they visit our site.

Of course, the payoff in this case is fairly predictable, which is to say that this piece (along with a few others in the New Jersey Copper series) is called a ‘Drunken Die Cutter’ variety due (as we describe in the listing of this coin in our inventory section) to the haphazard placement of the design elements on the obverse, with the horse’s head charmingly askew and seemingly too high, and the numerals in the date slanting in all different directions.

Which suggests that the engraver might possibly have had a cold one while he was working on these dies.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The only alternative we considered here was to leave off the "visit our website to find out why" part, but without that, we felt the ad lacked punch. And punch is good.