May 2, 2011: "Espiritu del ’76"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We’ve always liked these 1776-dated Latin American silver issues for two reasons:

1. They definitively circulated in early America, and were in fact legal tender in this country until the amazingly late date of 1857.

2. The only 1776-dated coins in the American series are the expensive Continental Dollar and the crudely made 1776 Machin’s Mills issues.

So if you want a neat and relatively affordable coin bearing this magic date, which was actually used in America, this type is a good choice.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
Our first version of this ad read "Real-y Patriotic." Which aside from being an extremely bad pun, was also not that easy to understand, since it required the reader to understand that ‘Real-y’ was a play on ‘Really’ and on the denomination ‘Real’, though on this piece it is shown as ‘Reales’ (as in 4 ‘Reales’).

So rather than fight that battle, we went with the we-hope-correctly-translated version of Spirit of ’76.