Best Way To Put Together High Quality Lincoln Cents 1959-Date?

Go to your local coin dealer, search their mint sets for nice cents. Buy the sets and sell off the coins you don't want. Take your time, buy quality, and have fun.

Gems abound in mint sets. Most dates have 5 to 10% of the cents as Gem though it does vary a lot. Many dealers keep books full of cents and they usually try to put nice ones in for a dollar or two.

BU rolls can be very inexpensive but there's a tendency for most to have no Gems and some to have lots of them.

To CCF! You can go to your local coin dealer, go on ebay, or search bank rolls.

I wouldn't necessarily suggest you buy slabbed coins in very high grade because they can be very pricey however people send in some very nice coins for grading and they come back in too low a grade . These are often dumped in the market for whatever they'll bring and some are extremely nice. The services sometimes undergrade and their standards might be different than you own. Wholesale on these in only $3 per coin but figure you'll have to pay 5 or $10. They're hard to find and some of the coins are dogs.

Out of the money slabs can sometimes be a good deal too. A $20 coin in a $20 slab is a bargain especially if it's undergraded.

Try to not pay much especially at first. A $20 1987-D is probably not worth the money because this date comes so nice it doesn't require much effort to find a spectacular Gem for the price of a mint set or roll. With experience you'll be able to spot good prices. Nice '68, '71-S, '79, and '84 cents are more worth paying up for since they are harder to find.

And one more, probably last, little piece of advice: Ignore the RedBook prices for Gem cents and all moderns. Where old coins are priced ridiculously high moderns are priced ridiculously low. You can't buy a 1984 cent in nice attractive Gem condition for 30c. Indeed, it is virtually unavailable at any price since the slabbed high grade 1984 cents are almost all covered in bubbles and blisters. Across the board nice well struck and mark free examples are available but only if you go out and find your own. Some are quite tough but they are all out there.

People see these prices in the various catalogs and mistakenly believe the coins must be common and readily available but some are not available at all and even PCGS lists them at low prices. Nice well made moderns can be very very tough and the catalogs often don't even reflect the difficulty of finding BU rolls.

On one cent coins look for complete steps on the reverse. Some won't be readily available in Gem with FS but they all exist. For just a dollar or two apiece you might want to first flesh out a collection and then upgrade later.

You can buy single cents that are clipped out of mint sets still in the cello and sold singularly on ebay.

And, like the example coins, you'll usually end up with junk. Most of these sellers have hundreds and just grab one out of pile and ship it. I consider such piles as rejected junk. I've known many dealers that cut up sets and sorted them. One even cut stuff open and put them in his register till.

Back to the OP's question:

It's like the old joke - what's the best way to get to Carnegie Hall.?

PRACTICE

It takes a bomb-load of searching and hard work to find HQ Memorial cents. You generally cannot go to shows/dealers and ask to see memorial cents. They're not like wheat and Indian cents. Most don't pull out a binder or boxes of individually-priced, HQ coins for you to look through. They usually send you to the bargain bin, mint sets or they might have some rolls or slabs if you're lucky.

If you're going for the HQ/PQ stuff, you really have to buy OBW rolls, crack them and look for gems. All the best coins I have (and others I know that do this too) came from OBW rolls.....some from mint sets as well. That said, it can get pretty expensive buying and cracking rolls - it's also extremely time consuming and you have to be pretty good at grading.

I also found a lot of nice stuff in regular old bank boxes and bags. I had a bank that was selling me 5000 ct bags from their lobby change machine. That was mostly folks home stashes in drawers and jars - pulled some amazing coins from that!

My next best source is people I meet through internet coin forums just like you! I've made many friends over the decades and that can lead to getting upgrades you purchase or get as gifts or trades.