> If they'd taken that whole year's production of the Record-level
> components and [for the 50th] added some subtle commemoration ...
> I would have probably even thought it was cool.
This is a a very good point. I too think that Campagnolo 50th stuff is gaudy, and have absolutely no desire to ever own a bike or grouppo of that type. The ICS modifications are much more subtle, at least when they aren't entirely gold plated.
As a collector, before there were bikes, there were coins. One of the coolest examples of a "subtle commemoration" is in the Lincoln penny, issued on the 100th year anniversary of Lincoln's birth, in 1909. In fact, the US Mint will revise the Lincoln Penny in 2009 on the 200th anniversary of his birth. Some of the first-year pennies commemorate the engraver, Victor D. Brenner, with a "V.D.B" carved on the back, at the bottom :
http://www.coinfacts.com/
The commemoration appears only on some of the first-year coins, and it disappeared entirely in 1910. One of the coins, the 1909 S-VDB, is the rarest and most valuable "regular" (non-mistake) penny known. That is the essence of cool, imho.
- Don "Land of Lincoln" Gillies San Diego, CA, USA
P.S. I magically found a 1909 (not VDB) penny in my change sometime in the past 2 years, in G-VG condition. I have waited all my life for such a lucky event; Previously, my best "change find" was a 1927 penny about 3-4 years ago, which I gave to my mom for her birthday, telling her "look, there are older things that YOU still in circulation!" Previous to that, I found nothing older than about 1940, even back in the 1970's when I began collecting in earnest.