February 20, 2012: "In His Mouth"

Author:
D. Wnuck

Concept:
In our opinion, when confronted with a coin (or token, as the case may be) with an unbelievably striking motif you really need to highlight it with a caption derived from the lyrics of a classic American folk song.

So of course that is exactly what we did with this proof-like 1800 England ‘The Uncharitable Monopolizer’ Penny featuring the not-often-seen-image of an apparently very large man with a hat on shoving the entire earth into his mouth.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We started with "Never eat anything larger than your head.", which is a line I believe I read in a cartoon years ago. And while it does seem appropriate here, it was deemed too silly for an ad for an important numismatic item like this.

Not that our second effort, the classic Alka-Seltzer ad inspired "I can’t believe he ate the whole thing.", was any more serious. Which is why that one too was scrapped in favor of the version in our final ad.

Note though that we briefly considered embellishing this ad with some musical notes to make it more obvious that the caption was a modified song lyric. In the end, however, we figured that would just be confusing to the reader. So we didn’t do it.