List of libraries

• Introduction
• Registers (1)
• Books (793)
• Borrowers (1182)
• Facts & figures

Also known as The Library of Innerpeffray. Located in Innerpeffray. Founded in 1680. Type of library: Other. Collection: Still in situ.
Address: Innerpeffray Library, Crieff, PH7 3RF
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Library description

Innerpeffray Library was founded in (or around) 1680 by David Drummond, third Lord Madertie, who left the sum of 5000 Scots marks in his Will for the establishment of a library which was to be ‘preserved entire and to be augmented by my successors yearly in time coming in measure underwritten for the benefit and encouragement of young students’.[1] Madertie’s Will stipulated that a keeper of books or librarian should be employed, that new books should be purchased yearly, and that a schoolhouse should be built. Madertie’s successors seem to have interpreted the phrase ‘young students’ liberally, and a further Deed of Mortification which solved some of the various legal problems posed by Madertie’s original Will interpreted the library as being for the benefit of the local community more broadly (‘for the benefit of the country’)[2], allowing almost any member of the community to read the library’s books, and only ‘restricting the use of the library to six or more parishes around’.[3]

Under the terms of the Mortification, Trustees – drawn from the important local landowning families – were appointed to manage the library, with the assumption that this Trusteeship would be passed down through the later generations of these families. Books from the library were made available to the local community from at least 1747 (although this may have been earlier; borrowers’ records are only extant from 1747, but Madertie’s collection was presumably available from the time the Deed of Mortification was proved in 1696) to 1968, when the library ceased to function as a lending library and became a ‘historic library’ visitor attraction. 

[1] David Drummond, third Lord Madertie, Will, 1691. Innerpeffray Library Founder’s MS 1691/ 001.

[2] ‘Memorial of the Right Honorable the Earl of Kinnoull for the opinion of Counsel regarding the Library of Innerpeffray’, Innerpeffray Library Miscellaneous MS 1825/002, p.12. 

[3] Anon, Innerpeffray Library & Chapel: A Historical Sketch, With some Notes on the books of the Library. Printed by Authority of the Governors (Crieff: David Phillips, 1916), p.2.

Borrower description

Borrowers were largely local people, although they occasionally came from as far afield as Stirling, some 25 miles away. They came from a surprisingly wide variety of social backgrounds, from local laird to shepherd and schoolchild, although the majority of the occupations represented come from the traditionally literate classes and the professions.

Holding description

The library began as Lord Madertie’s private collection of some four hundred books, mainly works of divinity, theology, law, science, agriculture and natural history. The collection grew through the generations to encompass philosophy, geography and travel, domestic economy and conduct books, periodicals and journals, and, from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, fiction, drama and poetry.

Sources

• Other: ‘Memorial of the Right Honorable the Earl of Kinnoull for the opinion of Counsel regarding the Library of Innerpeffray’, Innerpeffray Library Miscellaneous MS 1825/002
• Accessions records: ‘Note of Books Proposed to be Brought into the Library’, Innerpeffray Library Hay-Drummond MS 1744/001.
• Other: ‘The Petition of Wm. Young, 1823’. Innerpeffray Library Miscellaneous MS 1823/001

Secondary sources

 Anon, Innerpeffray Library & Chapel: A Historical Sketch, With some Notes on the books of the Library. Printed by Authority of the Governors (Crieff: David Phillips, 1916)

Paul Kaufmann, Libraries and their Users: Collected Papers in Library History (1969)

William Stewart, ‘A Quaint Corner in Libraria’, Glasgow Herald, Saturday June 4, 1898. Issue 133

Mark Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750-1820 (Leiden: Brill, 2010)

Paul Kaufmann,  ‘A Unique Record of a People’s Reading’, Libri, 14 (1964-1965), 227-42

George Chamier, The First Light: The Story of Innerpeffray Library (Published by the Library of Innerpeffray, 2009)

Cairns Mason, Lending Libraries in the spread of Enlightenment Thinking: two Scottish case studies, Innerpeffray Library, Crieff and the Monkland Friendly Society, Dunscore (Braco: DOICA, 2006).

Sources outside the period

Two further volumes of Borrowers' Registers, covering the period 1855-1968.

David Drummond, third Lord Madertie, Will, 1691. Innerpeffray Library Founder’s MS 1691/ 001

Innerpeffray Library 1855 Catalogue