April 19, 2010: "Money-Making Scheme"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
As this is the first time we’ve ever featured one of these Lesher Dollars in an ad, and we figured that some prospective ad-readers have never seen one before, we thought it was important to introduce the issue and describe it as what it is: Mr. Lesher’s attempt to, for profit, make his own, private circulating coinage (an idea which lent itself nicely to a caption with a very appropriate double meaning).

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We considered going in a totally different direction here by focusing on the incredibly intricate mining scene on the obverse of this piece in which seemingly dozens of tiny people are pushing little wheel barrows and riding tiny horse-drawn carts and stuff with: "Where’s Waldo? We think he might be somewhere in that mining scene." But that presented 3 challenges:

1. It didn’t explain what the heck this piece is (which, as noted above, we thought was kind of important)

2. We weren’t sure if the little tiny people on this coin would even be visible in our ad, and

3. The "Where’s Waldo?" approach required us to use that entire phrase in order to be understandable, and made for an even longer and more awkward caption than usual

All of which convinced us that maybe this really wasn’t such a good idea after all. So we scrapped it.