Historic Scrapbooks Donated to USC

In 1874, shortly before opening his first Los Angeles practice, young Dr. Walter Lindley began a hobby that grew into a lifetime collection of 29 scrapbooks. He included programs, medicinal recipes and an account of a lecture delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Lindley became dean of the USC College of Medicine, died in 1922 and his scrapbooks remained in the family. Until this month, when they were donated to Honnold Library of the Claremont Colleges by Lindley’s grandsons, Walter Lindley and F. Haynes Lindley Jr., as part of a 3,000-volume book collection in memory of their father, Francis Haynes Lindley.

The collection--with 90% gathered by Dr. Lindley, a scholar of the theater--includes several 16th-Century volumes and a number of first editions and is rich in Shakespeare, Milton, Samuel Johnson and Sir Richard Burton.

And the irreplaceable stuff of those scrapbooks: documents to a lot on Hope Street, a list of delegates to the Republican Party convention in 1890, a certificate of membership signed in 1905 by Gov. George Pardee . . .