A Look at a Rare 1934 World Wide Gum Canadian Goudey Uncut Sheet

Here’s a pretty spectacular piece of Canadian Goudey history: an uncut 24-card sheet from the 1934 World Wide Gum set.

1934 Goudey Canadian Uncut Sheet – Oregon Trail Sports Auctions

The sheet was offered in Oregon Trail Sports Auctions’ November 4, 1998 catalog as a “1934 Goudey Canadian Uncut Sheet” and was said to have been part of a 1993 find of approximately 10 Goudey sheets saved by the family of one of the company’s managing directors. According to the old catalog description, this particular sheet originally sold at Superior Galleries in February 1993 for $17,050.

And there are a lot of familiar faces packed into those 24 cards: Bill Terry, Lefty Grove, Dizzy Dean, Chuck Klein, Charlie Gehringer, Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Cochrane, Frankie Frisch, Paul Waner, Heinie Manush, Leo Durocher, Arky Vaughan, and Carl Hubbell.

The sheet is also a neat illustration of how the Canadian issue was put together. The 1934 World Wide Gum set contains 96 cards, with #1–48 using the 1933 Goudey design and #49–96 using the familiar 1934 Goudey “Lou Gehrig Says…” design.

This particular sheet accounts for World Wide Gum #49–72, beginning with Ray Benge in the upper-left corner and ending with Hughie Critz in the lower-right. Read from left to right and top to bottom, the cards are numbered consecutively, a detail that becomes more interesting when compared with their American counterparts.

As explained in the SABR Baseball Cards Research Committee’s excellent Cracking the Canadian Goudey Code, rather than retaining Goudey’s seemingly scattered card numbers World Wide Gum numbered the cards according to their positions on the sheets, from left to right and top to bottom.