June 15, 2009: "The Only Remaining?"

Author:
D. Wnuck

Concept:
We wanted to do an ad with this sort of theme since we (and many of our customers) have had it up to here (hand at chin level) with wonderful gold coins that get stripped and dipped and upgraded from beautiful, original AU58s to awful, white-gold MS61s.

And while we’re not sure if this is in fact the only remaining original ’54-O, it is a thought provoking question, since this particular issue has been all but decimated by coin conservators through the years.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We had a couple of ideas based on this similar thought, including:

"Unconserved, uncorrupted and unbelievable." (which is actually a minor tweak of a 1979 Sports Illustrated cover describing the then 4-O Tampa Bay Buccaneers which read "Unbeaten, Untied and Unbelievable").

But describing a coin as ‘Unbelievable’ seemed ill-advised to us, so we didn’t – migrating instead to the more straightforward “Is this the only original ‘54-O $3 left?”, before finally settling on the caption seen in our finished ad.