August 12, 2013: "Very Funny"

Author:
RYK & C. Sloan

Concept:
In decades of buying and selling certified coins, this delightful, old-holdered, gold-stickered, sharply struck and lustrous 1852 $10 is among the most egregiously undergraded pieces we’ve ever handled, a fact that simply needed to be highlighted in this week’s ad through the use of this VF = Very Fine = Very Funny caption suggested independently and simultaneously by our two prolific guest authors.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
All of the alternatives this week were focused on this same theme, starting with "Somewhere there is a grader who called this coin VF."

But that seemed too controversial, so we replaced it with: "VF? Are you %#@$ kidding me?"

Which we quickly determined to be inappropriate and thus abandoned in favor of the literal "Is this the world’s finest VF coin?"

But none of those seemed quite as good as our guest authors’ work, so that is the one we went with.