There are some things you get when you’re a kid that you never throw away. You keep them until someone invents the Internet and you realise how easy it is to sell what turned out to be junk to someone who doesn’t know it’s junk.

What am I talking about?! This is not junk! These a priceless artefacts of pioneer photography!

So how much will you pay then?

My memory told me I got these 3D photographs out of National Geographic magazine, but these days my memory likes to compensate for its recollectile dysfunction by concocting stories out of thin air. Mr World Wise Web tells me these actually came from Look magazine. My memory and I didn’t even know we got that magazine at our house, but Mr Web says we must have, so there you go.

Then he said, “Have you looked at the back of the card” My investigative skills are as acute as my memory, so of course I hadn’t. It’s all explained there in black and white, though not 3D.

Mr Web, who I tracked down at the home of OuterAspect.com having coffee, ran the whole history of lenticular photography by me. His buddy said I could make my own 3D pictures by simply running a series of layers through Photoshop’s Motion Graphic machine and then pasting a ridged “lens” over top, but he said I’d have to buy the lens, so that’s out.

I always thought the big thing about my 3D picture of Thomas Edison (or at least his bust — pardon me, ladies) was that it was a very cool image, but Mr Web’s pal David E Roberts told me that the bigger thing was that this was the first mass-produced lenticular photo, a breakthrough that had the advertising industry of the mid-1960s wetting itself.

Soon there would be 3D billboards on every city corner and 3D ads on every other page of every magazine. And cheerful robots would turn the pages for us while pouring us a beer and vacuuming.
There’s more!