Love Libraries - Scotland’s historic first lending library continues to delight and serve

Scotland’s historic first free public lending library continues to delight and enthral visitors – nearly 350 years after it opened. Innerpeffray Library in rural Perthshire has welcomed readers from all walks of life since 1680, when it was founded by local landowner David Drummond, the third Lord Madertie.

His trailblazing move allowed everyone from farm workers and weavers to schoolchildren and scholars to borrow and learn from his vast and varied collection of books – which were incredibly expensive in the 17th century and usually owned only by the wealthy. Innerpeffray’s borrowers’ register offers unique insight into the reading habits of the community, near Crieff.

While the library stopped lending books in 1968, it remains open to the public, who can browse rare treasures within its collections. Innerpeffray, now an independent charitable trust, attracts visitors from around the world.

Innovation

Lara Haggerty, Innerpeffray Library Manager and Keeper of Books, said: “What’s fascinating about Innerpeffray is that it served the local community in its own wee quiet way for so long. It wasn’t out there being an innovation, even though it was an innovation. It was just doing its thing, lending the books it had, and people were using them.

The people are the story at Innerpeffray. We have a beautiful rare book collection but the real story is what people were reading, how far people travelled, what their jobs were, what they went on to do with their lives.

We’re a library but we’re more like a museum and we welcome people in to share the story.

People also visit us for research particularly and inspiration – artists, poets and novelists all use the library.

It’s such a lovely place to be because you feel connected to the past through the records we have. Our borrowing register dates back to 1747. It’s magical letting someone from the other side of the world hold in their own hands the book that their great-great-great-great-great-grandfather borrowed. It’s quite emotional for them to hold the physical book they took the time to choose. It’s so immediate and personal.

History

Innerpeffray offers so much knowledge about local history and the people who lived in the area which might otherwise have been lost to time.

It’s interesting how easy it is to lose a little bit of history, Lara said. “It’s embarrassing that we don’t know a great deal about what happened here in Innerpeffray in the 20th century because we had two horrendous world wars and the library wasn’t used so much, so we don’t have so much of a lending record.

The records are indicative of readers and reading trends across the centuries, such as the popularity of travel books in the 18th century and the enduring popularity of history books and adventure stories.

We have amazing stories, like that of John Barclay, Lara said. He was born [in 1758] and lived on a farm just across the river and would borrow books from the library. He initially trained as a minister then went to Edinburgh and discovered medicine, retraining as a doctor. He became a professor of Comparative Anatomy at the University of Edinburgh and rewrote the whole way we think about how our body is made.

Sometimes people do really big things by going to the library.

Surprised

Lara said it “always astonishes” visitors that so many people in the past could read.

They also get surprised about how expensive books were, she added. When our founder, who was born in 1611, was accumulating books, a single book could be a year’s wages, or two, for an ordinary working person.

It’s really recently that books have become disposable. But if we’re moving to less of a waste culture, it’s better to borrow the book, free, from your local library and then give it back.

The oldest book in the collection is Scots philosopher John Duns Scotus’s ​​Questiones in Quattuor Libros Sententarium (Questions in Four Books of Statements), from 1476, which was donated 12 years ago by an American collector.
Lara said:

It’s a lovely example of early printing. One of the things we get excited about here is not just the content but how the book is printed and bound, the paper, the watermarks.

In early books, because they were so expensive and paper was so expensive, people wrote in the books all the time, it was the done thing to use the margin to make your own notes. It’s really interesting.

Benefits

Despite the wealth of information and incredible books in Innerpeffray’s collection, there is nothing on paper that explains why Drummond set up the lending library.
Lara said:

When he wrote his will, he got quite carried away talking about the library and insisting the family keep it going, and explaining that there should be a Keeper of Books, of which I’m number 32. But he doesn’t say, I’m doing this because…’. He says it’s for the benefit of everyone, particularly young students, but what his motivation was, we don’t know.

His great-nephew, who set up the charitable trust that looks after us, said it was for the benefit of mankind, which is quite a substantial statement.

We’ve come so far from the founding of Scotland’s very first free and public lending library but funding means there might not be as many. I don’t think we’ve made enough progress to abandon them.

Learn more about Innerpeffray Library at innerpeffraylibrary.co.uk