September 29, 2008:

"Good as Gold"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
Obviously we wanted to highlight that this otherwise extremely foreign looking coin (with a weird obverse portrait, unintelligible legends and an oddball denomination) was very much legal tender in the fledgling US.

We also liked the idea of a subtle caption with two meanings, suggesting that it was figuratively good as gold (i.e. legal tender), and literally GOOD as GOLD here.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The best alternative we came up with was "America’s first gold dollar" which, in addition to being relatively catchy, and frankly pretty clever, is sort of true, since a 1/2 Escudo was equivalent to 8 Reales, which itself was equivalent to a dollar (more or less).

I say ‘more or less’, because these coins traded at different exchange rates in the various colonies, and the whole thing gets extremely complicated very quickly.

In any case, we decided to opt for the less controversial and far more vague caption, which might have been playing it too safe.

Do you think we played it too safe?

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"Good as Gold"