January 11, 2010: "A Maine to Remember"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We’ve always favored captions – like this one – which may appeal to the educated collector, who in this case will note the obvious allusion to the rallying cry ‘Remember the Maine’, a reference to the sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898 which led to the Spanish-American War.

This caption also reminded Dave of the old movie about the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic “A Night to Remember.” Which has nothing to do with the Maine, or the coin in this ad, but he always thought that was a cool title for a film.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We considered some minor variants of the final version, including: "You’ll remember this Maine." But that sounded presumptuous and self-aggrandizing to us.

We also toyed with using the image of the entire slab instead of just the obverse of the coin, but we used a slab shot just a few weeks ago, and you don’t want to overdo stuff like that.

So we didn’t.