Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Innerpeffray Library, Borrowers’ Registers Vol. 2, page 6v.
This photograph shows a page from the borrowers’ register of Innerpeffray Library, near Crieff in Perthshire. The date is 1859, and the borrowers come mainly from nearby settlements. The first two columns record the date the book was borrowed, the third is the name of the book. The fourth column gives the name of the borrower, followed in the fifth and sixth by the borrower’s occupation and then address. The final three columns record the book’s return and the date of that return.

Leighton Library MS30
This photograph shows a page from the Leighton Library’s ‘Water Drinkers’ borrowers’ register, so-called because those recorded in its pages were temporary visitors to Dunblane who had come to ‘drink the waters’ at the nearby spa of Cromlix. Here we see the borrowings of Miss Dalgleish, in 1815, and Dr Murray, first in 1815, and then in 1817. Both paid the sum of two shillings and sixpence, which gave them borrowing rights for a fortnight.

Orkney Library & Archive MS C05-100-5
This page from the Orkney Library Borrowers’ Register for the period December 1820 to March 1824 shows the borrowings of a wide variety of Orkney borrowers. Popular here are periodicals, such as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, and the novels of Walter Scott – with borrowings of his novels Kenilworth (1821), The Monastery (1820) and The Pirate (1822) featuring repeatedly.