A Rare 1937 R342 Goudey Baseball Thum-Movies Window Sign

I ran across this window sign advertising the circa 1937 R342 Goudy Thum-Movies in Sotheby’s March 1991 auction catalog, which included The Copeland Collection; it’s a cool-looking sign in black and white, but it’s actually red, white, and blue.

Sotheby’s described the window sign as follows:

Goudey Flip Movie Window Sign, circa 1937, red, white and blue, blank on reverse, thin paper and very delicate, depicting a drawing of a flip movie being flipped and also “gum and pictures only 2 cents” which gives it provenance to the R342 set, near mint to mint. 5⅞ in. by 7⅝ in.

The window sign for the R342 Goudey Flip Movies, were meant to be glued to the window of candy stores. This sign still shows the strips of glue along the edges since it was never used.

Their estimate for the item was $1,000-1,500.

Based on the staple holes and a bit of the paper loss, it looks like Heritage resold the same item in February 2017 for $384.

Heritage highlighted that it was the first time they had the opportunity to present this piece to their bidders and that the item was very fragile.

REA sold the following copy, which originated directly from Goudey’s files, in the spring of 2017 for $360.

They wrote that it still had the original strips of clear glue along the vertical sides, which a candy store was supposed to wet to attach the poster to the window. This one also had two clean staple holes, but the paper loss differs from the Heritage example.

For more information, I previously shared a piece about this set’s cousin; the R326 Goudey Flip Movies set, and Sports Collectors Daily has a nice overview of both Goudey Baseball Movies sets.