March 16, 2009: "Full Frontal"

Author:
M. Agre

Concept:
The most interesting feature of this coin (aside from its lovely original color, choice surfaces and abject scarcity) is that the mintmark is on the front, which all but begged for us to highlight it in a witty caption. We also felt that after a series of fairly pedestrian ad captions over the last few weeks, it was time to take a risk. So we did.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The final selection was fairly difficult this week, as we had a number of alternatives:

"Hey Bob – should we put ‘da mintmark on the front or ‘da back?", and while this may have been an actual conversation that took place in the New Orleans mint in 1839, it didn’t seem edgy enough to get noticed.

We thought "Don’t be shy, show us your mintmark!" was clever, but then started imagining all sorts of Mardi Gras-related interpretations of this caption which could be considered extreeeeeemely offensive to some readers.

"From New Orleans, and proud of it." was intended to be a more mainstream reference, though we were concerned that people might not connect the ‘pride’ comment with the mintmark location.

So we decided to go for the Full Frontal version, and risk the consequences.