March 18, 2013: "Exotic Plumage"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
While German New Guinea does not get quite as much numismatic publicity as some places, you have to admit that they reeeeaaaally stepped out when designing this totally cool 10 Pfennig. For there on the obverse of this fabulous, old-holdered, red and brown near gem is the striking Bird-of-Paradise, known for the exotic plumage highlighted in this ad, and, of course, also featured in bright yellow on the flag of modern Papua New Guinea:

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We had several other concepts this week, including ideas based on this being a ‘bird-in-the-hand’, another about bird-dogging, and one which focused on the the elaborate mating ritual of the Bird-of-Paradise (look it up), but alas none of them ever made it to ‘ad-ready’ form.

So we went with the Plumage angle as seen in our final ad.