Vaulted Press was born from my lifelong passion for collecting.
It started innocently; I remember 1970s family vacations in the back of our enormous sky blue Chevy station wagon, devouring grocery store digests of Spiderman, Doctor Strange, and the Avengers, imagination afire.
Over the course of my teens, I grew into a price guide memorizing collector and treasure hunter. On a later road trip, (comic people will appreciate this), I even purchased a Phantom Lady #18 from a West Virginia antique store. This was an actual piece of comic book history, a salacious example used in the book Seduction of the Innocent, which led to the creation of the Comics Code, and the end of the Golden Age era.
Each weekend I walked to my local comic shop, Louisville’s The Great Escape to buy a stack of books and talk plots and artists with the staff. At 15, I was honored to be offered my first job there, where I learned to nimbly file issues and operate a cash register in front of the display wall. A nerd dream job.
Coins too. From a young age I caught the bus home from school in front of a very respectable coin and stamp shop, and visited them daily, or at least peered through the window. I was captivated by the connection to history, precious metals, the quality of engraving and bas relief— and I built a little coin collection that I treasured.
In my twenties, and for the next thirty years, my collections went by the wayside, but my love of art broadened. After a twenty five year career in graphic design and user experience design, I arrived at Vaulted Press (after deciding to stop working for “The Man”), as a way to merge my grownup skills and youthful passions, to make the items that collectors love accessible to everyone.
It’s a gallery where you can own high end custom framed reproductions of specimens to quicken a collector's pulse and delight a decorator's eye. No vaults. No slabs.
Thank you for joining me.
Joel