April 20, 2009: "Massachusetts Silver Coin"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
After last week’s almost certainly too-silly ad, we decided to swing the pendulum back to serious with this weighty ad for an important piece of Massachusetts silver.

Still, we managed to inject a subtle dual meaning into the caption suggesting that this particular type (a Noe 1 Pine Tree Shilling generally recognized as among the most aesthetic in the series) AND this particular specimen (a nearly round, perfectly centered, choice uncirculated example with a traceable provenance through epic auction sales back to 1895) can be called the definitive Massachusetts silver coin.

Because we think that happens to be true.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We briefly considered trotting out the serious (and seriously looooong) pedigree chain with the highfalutin “The Winsor-Earle-Parsons-Ellsworth-Garrett Specimen.” caption, but decided that many CW readers wouldn’t get it.

So we figured we’d leave that sort of thing for the website where we have more room to explain it, and go with the more mainstream caption on your left.