Ripple Effect

Spring is in the air and we all know what that means-REA's annual auction has blasted off and as always presents many wondrous things to bid and behold.  As longtime readers of this blog know, REA has long been a honey hole of Topps test issues and this time around there is a really neat piece that is related to the prototype 3-D cards used to develop 1968's 3-D Baseball.

There is a well known Brooks Robinson prototype card that you can see in the links linked above but Xograph/Visual Panographics also created a Football (Soccer) prototype that is equally as rare:

Love that team font!  The player depicted is actually a Brazilian named Jarbas Faustinho who player for Napoli from 1962-63 through 1968-69 before departing for three years. The back is blank but stamped in similar fashion to may baseball 3-D's:

Compare that to the stamps on the baseball versions (which are pre-production and not a prototype like the Robinson, which is unstamped):

As you can plainly see, the stamp is contained within the dimensions of the baseball version but not so on the soccer card.  Ergo, it must be a tad tinier but I'm not so sure. It also appears that the back of the soccer card uses a font made  up of dots, possibly from a dot matrix printer, while the blurriness of the baseball example above looks like a true rubber stamp was used.

It's a neat piece and like the Robinson prototype the number of extant examples can surely be counted on one hand.  Both the Robinson prototype and this card are said to come from an old Xograph employee so it looks some examples were returned to them after all!