June 9, 2008: "I’m Henry the Eighth, I am"

Author:
A. Lustig

Concept:
This coin all but demanded that we purchase it because (in addition to it being beautiful, well struck, interesting and historic) it seemed tailor made for one of our CoinWorld ads.

And so we did, highlighting the not-so-readily-apparent fact that this coin bears a portrait of everyone’s favorite monarch Henry VIII. And what better way to do that than to use a caption based on a song written in 1911, but popularized more recently by Herman’s Hermits? Our thinking exactly.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
All of the ideas were based on this same concept, though with various alternatives for exactly how to write ‘Henry VIII’ so that it would read properly in a caption, and how many ‘I ams’ were needed.

After considerable exploration of all possibilities, we opted for the extremely literal version, writing out ‘Henry the Eighth’ in such a way that it could not be misread by CW subscribers, and going with just one ‘I am’.

The consensus was that "I’m Henry the Eighth, I am, I am." was simply one ‘I am’ too many.