January 7, 2019: "Join the Club"

Author:
G. Strickland

Concept:
Years ago (long before your author was in the coin business) I would still talk coins from time to time with work colleagues with a shared interest in numismatics.

And I remember one of those guys – a Mr. G. Strickland – would always sign messages to me with “S VDB Club”, a sort of pseudo-secret code undecipherable to our non-collector friends which indicated that he proudly owned an example of this famous 20th century key date issue and was thus a member of an exclusive club.

I never forgot that, and years later I thought it would make an interesting CRO ad. All it required was having the right, relatively obtainable S VDB to place above the caption, such as this charming, totally original, old-holdered and thoroughly CAC-ified Ch. XF example.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
Given the childhood longing this issue engendered for so many of us, we strongly considered a reprisal of our March 5, 2007 “How Old Were You?” ad (which, based on the overwhelming feedback we got, was one of the most popular we’ve ever run), but ultimately decided we weren’t quite ready for a repeat on that one just yet.

So we went instead for G. Strickland’s fresh new version seen here.