BOOKMARK collector Joe Stephenson has a poser for Looking Back readers.

He has been collecting bookmarks for about 15 years, and has between 30,000 and 40,000 in 200 albums at his home in Victoria Road, Horwich.

Joe, aged 62, who is a former German teacher at Thornleigh Salesian College and Rivington and Blackrod High School, founded the British Bookmark Society in 1991 and produces a quarterly newsletter.

His collection, which he believes to be the largest in the country, includes a number of small photographic bookmarks -- dating from the late 1920s and 1930s -- which feature local churches.

The words "Edwards, Market Hall, Bolton, Lancs" are printed on the back of many of them.

He says: "They were typically produced to be sold to members of parishes in aid of church funds, organ funds, repairs and the like, or to commemorate a jubilee.

"They usually show a church, often the minister or priest -- most Christian denominations are represented -- and often have a red rose on them as well."

The earliest is 1925 and the latest is from 1936.

Joe is keen to learn anything which readers might know about Edwards. He has discovered from a listing in a Lancashire directory that G Edwards was a second-hand bookseller in the Market Hall.

"There must be somebody who knew him," Joe says. "Was he just an agent or did he produce these bookmarks himself?"

He would also like to know where Mr Edwards advertised his products or services.

The local bookmarks include one for a choir effort at Harvey Street Methodist Church, Halliwell, in 1936, and another for St Gregory the Great, Farnworth, which features a view of the church interior and pictures of the Very Rev R Canon Holmes and the Rev J Turner.

Others were produced for Daisy Hill Primitive Methodists and St Peter's Church, Hindley.

Joe says the British Bookmark Society has just under 100 members throughout the world, and includes people with "absolutely stunning" collections.

Some of those he has collected are printed memorial silks from between 1910 and 1939 which commemorate individual deaths -- mostly in the north of England -- and were probably used in the family bible.

"I would also like to know how they were distributed and when," Joe added.

So what is the word for a collector of bookmarks?

Joe says the word "signetologist" has been coined from the French word "signet", but he prefers the straightforward "bookmark collector".

If anybody can help Joe, his telephone number is 01204 692458.