In his own words, Joseph Parks was “invalided from the army” in 1917.  By one account he had also once made his living as a sailor or fisherman.  After leaving the army, he decided to once again devote himself to his hobby of amateur journalism.  He set up a print shop, and issued the first number of Vanity Fair in June, 1917.  At first this was mainly devoted to the publication of literature and news related to amateur journalism.  H. P. Lovecraft was a subscriber and early contributor.  But even the first volume contained two articles on old boys’ journals.

Vanity Fair ran to 31 numbers.  The final number was that for May-June 1927.  With the 32^nd issue, for April, 1928 Parks changed the name of his magazine to Collector’s Miscellany.  Now it was dedicated exclusively to collecting – juvenile theatres, boys’ paper, match box labels, coins, transfer tokens, in short anything that could be collected.  Frank Jay, Barry Ono and John Medcraft were regular contributors.

During the war years Joseph Parks was on war rescue service, and J. A. Birkbeck took over as publisher for the 8 numbers of the 4^th Series.  These were of a much smaller format, and appeared irregularly.  It was during this time, while the Collector’s Miscellany was “on hiatus”, that Bill Gander decided to fill the void by publishing the Story Paper Collector.

After the war Parks once again took over the reins and published the 5^th series.  As some of the “old boys” who had been interested in bloods and penny dreadfuls passed away, the focus shifted more to the more recent boys’ papers like Magnet and Gem.  Altogether 108 numbers of Vanity Fair/Collector’s Miscellany were published.  The last issue of Collector’s Miscellany was dated Nov. 1953.  Parks passed away at age 62, on August 10th, 1954.  He had been a keen collector of boys’ papers himself.

If you can fill any gaps in the table below then please contact me

Introduction, scans and index kindly provided by Justin Gilbert. You can find the index here.