February 8, 2010: "Plated"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
Do you remember where you were in 1937? I personally do not (since unfortunately I hadn’t been born yet), but I do know where this coin was – it resided in the important and comprehensive Massachusetts Silver collection of Mr. Carl Wurtzbach.

I know this because there is a very clear picture of this coin in that 1937 catalog. As there is in Sydney P. Noe’s landmark 1947 reference ‘The Silver Coinage of Massachusetts’, and in Walter Breen’s 1988 ‘Complete Encyclopedia of U.S. and Colonials Coins’.

Which to us is very cool and certainly ‘ad-worthy’, as it indicates that 1) This coin was considered sufficiently desirable to have been selected by a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of collectors and numismatists to illustrate this variety, and 2) It looks exactly the same today as it did in photographs taken 73, 63 and 22 years ago.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The only alternatives we considered were versions that squeezed even more information about this coin into the ad.

Ultimately, though, nothing else fit, restricting us to the provenance noted above, and not allowing us to to mention that this coin also resided in the august collections of T. James Clarke, Wendell C. Foster, F.C.C. Boyd and John Ford through the years.

But that’s OK, as that might have been overkill.