Rare Topps 3D Set at August Premier Auction on Fanatics Collect

Discover the Origin Story of This Collector Must-Have

To help kick off Fanatic Collect’s August Premier Auction | Ultra-Rare Collectibles, Nando Di Fino puts the spotlight on an incredibly rare test run of 1968 Topps 3-D cards.

The August Premier Auction runs from August 14 to 28. View & Bid on the cards on Fanatics Collect now.

By 1968, the Golden Age of 3D (in films and comics, at least) had come to an end. The Creature From The Black Lagoon, for instance, was released in 1954. Superman’s famous 3D issue was printed in 1953. Still, taking a shot at the technology was something different and fun. So, in 1968, Topps made a set of cards unlike anything collectors had seen before.

Using lenticular technology advanced by a Manhattan-based company named Xograph, these “3-D” cards eschewed the clunky red-and-blue glasses and could be experienced using the naked eye. The image wasn’t as much traditional 3D as it was just very cool moving imagery. The card would change perspective as you moved it from side to side, something modern collectors may recognize from 2021’s Topps MLB 3D Baseball set.

But there was a twist. Topps released the 1968 cards on a test run, and most historical accounts about the “3-D” set agree that they could only be found in and around Brooklyn, NY. Because of the scarcity, the set has grown in legend (and value), with the “Bob” Clemente serving as the crown jewel.  

In 2025, the history of this set took another turn when Andy Wolfe and Cory Martin from HBZ Sports Cards in Kingsport, Tennessee, had a friend ask them to look at his dad’s collection.

“Like a lot of collections we look at, 99.9% of it was from the junk wax era,” Andy says, “And then he had one folder that he handed me, and I opened it up and saw what it was, and I was like, ‘Oh, well, we got something here!’”

That binder contained a trove of vintage 3-D cards, but instead of being tucked into clear plastic pages, they were glued to black construction paper. 

“So immediately, I’m like, ‘Well, this sucks,’” Andy remembers. “Here are these super rare cards, but they’re glued to the page.”

However, as the duo began investigating it further, the presentation became more of an asset than a drawback. 

Underneath each row of cards is a typed-out caption on white paper that says “LOOK sample” and “Job No. 38168.” Andy’s best guess, after researching the cards and timeline, was that they were likely a salesman’s binder, and this was a pitch for LOOK magazine. A giant “psychedelic elephant/penguin thing” was also included, probably to show LOOK what Xograph was capable of. 

But the beauty here lies in the non-psychedelic cards. First and foremost, there is the Clemente. “I just knew the Clemente,” Andy explains. “That’s the big one of the 12 baseball players [in the set]. So I knew the Clemente. As soon as I saw it, I was like, ‘okay.’”

And then things got interesting. 

“The crazy thing was, I didn’t know a lot of the rest of them,” Andy says. “I got back and started doing some research. And some of those have never been seen before.”

In 1970, Xograph used the 3-D technology to put out a football set. The cards are relatively common; it was released widely—it acts like a normal, fun set would. But in the front of the binder, Andy and Cory noticed two Tucker Frederickson cards—“a big one and a small one.” The small one had sold a couple copies in previous years, but they believe the big one—after exhaustive research on the cards, which included contacting a 3-D cards “guru” in New York—has never been seen before. 

Also in the binder were three Italian soccer cards—two of which have also, to the best of the duo’s research, never been seen before. 

And to deepen the mystery of it all, Andy and Cory went back to the person they got the binder from to ask about its origin — the seller’s father spent years working for a local chemical company before retiring and taking a job in the Expos’ minor league system. But he said he didn’t know where his father got it from. 

“He had this huge collection that was mostly ’80s and ’90s junk wax stuff,” Andy says. “I don’t know if a minor league manager gave it to him, or if he just randomly picked it up at a yard sale. I have no idea.”

“I’m sure it’s a one of one,” Cory adds. “I can’t imagine anything like this is still out there in its entirety and still intact in the salesman’s form.”

The August Premier Auction runs from August 14 to 28. View & Bid on the cards on Fanatics Collect now.

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