Collectors Corner^SM: The Collectibles Marketplace

A comparison of the 1960 Small Date (left) and 1960 Large Date (right) Lincoln Cents. Click image to enlarge.

The Lincoln Memorial Cent series, which ran from 1959 through 2008, remains one of the most widely collected areas of the U.S. coin catalog. This is in large part thanks to the hundreds of billions of “pennies” emitted from the United States Mint during that coin’s run and the fact that, despite the discontinuation of circulating one cent coins in 2025, billions upon billions remain in circulation.

And even as more valuable pre-1982 bronze Lincoln Cents disappear from circulation much faster than the later zinc-based cents, there are still enough 1960 Lincoln Cents in the wild that plenty of collectors are unsure how to differentiate more common large dates from the scarcer, more valuable small dates.

The year 1960 was a period of transitioning date formats for the Lincoln Cent, which had recently adopted the Lincoln Memorial reverse by sculptor-engraver Frank Gasparro. The changes in the sizes of dates on 1960 Lincoln Memorial Cents caused much public interest, especially as coin collecting was enjoying its day in the Sun as one of the hottest hobbies in the United States.

In the days after collectors had discovered the existence of large date and small date varieties for the 1960 Lincoln Cent, bags of the small dates (originating from either the Philadelphia Mint or Denver Mint) fetched some $10,000 for each bag of 5,000 coins; that translates to $2 per coin. Even with the passage of decades, the 1960 Small Date Lincoln Cent, regardless of whether they hailed from the Philadelphia or Denver Mint, remains much scarcer than their large-date counterparts.

Looking through a 10X loupe can help you in telling the large dates and small dates apart; the 1960 Small Date and Large Date Lincoln Cents can be readily distinguished by looking for the size and shape of the “0” in the last numeral of the date. With the small date, the “0” appears smaller than that of the large date, with the interior of the small “0” looking something like an oval. Meanwhile, the top of the “9” digit is nearly inline with the top of the first digit, “1.”