January 18, 2010:

"Was it Really Necessary?"

Author:
D. Wnuck

Concept:
This is one of those ‘let’s just go ahead and say what everyone is already thinking’ sort of ads, since this Gobrecht obverse design seems to be universally loved, and most everyone we know likes this design better than the one the mint cranked out for the following 3+ decades.

Oh well – at least there are a few of these around to satisfy the demand for what might have been. Of course, most of them have been cleaned, re-toned, repaired or otherwise numismatically flambéed (editor – do you have any idea how long it took me to figure out how to insert that accent mark over the first ‘e’?), so we really wanted to feature this nice, uncorrupted one.

Caption that didn’t make the cut:
We had a few variants of this same idea, starting with "Is this design better than the regular issue?", but that made it sound like we weren’t sure.

So we went with the slightly annoyed tone in the final version suggesting that, in our view, sometimes less is more, and the starless design is simply waaaaaaay better.

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"Was it Really Necessary?"