Sunday Whatever

A Favourite Place: Innerpeffray, Scotland’s oldest free lending library, established 1680.
Article by Michael Bloor

I’ve always been nuts about libraries. I’m pretty fond of bookshops, but libraries were my first and truest love. First of all, the local Carnegie library, where I went as a little lad, accompanying my grandad when he went to change his Zane Grey cowboy thrillers. Then, the central library in town, with its reference section, and its newspaper/periodicals section, with old men dozing in the central heating. The university libraries and The National Library of Scotland, where all manner of rare and wonderful books can be summoned up from the stacks for your study, all absolutely…FREE!

But my favourite library of them all is Innerpeffray, less than twenty miles up the road from my home, on a little, wooded cliff above the River Earn, up a dead-end road in rural Perthshire. A handsome eighteenth-century building, it sits cheek-by-jowl with a pre-reformation chapel, where the library was originally housed when it was founded in 1680 as a free lending library, the first in Scotland, by David Drummond, 3^rd Lord Maddertie (1611-94).

David Drummond lived through a very bloody century. That great general, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, was Drummond’s brother-in-law, Drummond fought alongside him in The Bishops’ Wars and in Scotland’s Civil War. It’s said that, finally, all wars end in defeat. One imagines that Drummond came to that view too. In his old age, he spent his time in quiet reading and contemplation, and he left behind him his considerable library of more than 400 volumes to form the basis of a free lending library, together with funds for adding new books in due course. He also built a school and a schoolhouse, with the schoolteacher also charged with the duties of a ‘Keeper of the Books.’

The lending of the Innerpeffray books, a service later undertaken by Perthshire County Council, continued until 1968. The upkeep of the library, now a museum, is the responsibility of a trust, The Innerpeffray Mortification; the present (32^nd ) Keeper of the Books is Lara Haggerty. Visitors can inspect the many rare and beautiful books in the library’s collection of 3,500 volumes, such as Geraldus Mercator’s multi-volume Novus Atlas of 1638, or a ‘Treacle Bible’ (‘Is there no treacle in Gilead?’ Jeremiah 8:22), or Hollinshed’s Chronicles, including Macbeth’s meeting with the three witches (a story that Shakespeare later appropriated for his own use).

Although the borrowing of books was discontinued in 1968, visitors are welcome (under supervision) to inspect and read all but the rarest and most fragile volumes. I’ve been dropping in now and again for twenty-odd years and I always find something new to interest me. The other day I picked up an early biography of   Robert Louis Stevenson* and found in one of the appendices three different drafts of the beginning of Stevenson’s last (and possibly best) novel, Weir of Hermiston – an impressive demonstration of the care that Stevenson lavished on his prose.

In 2013, the library was the beneficiary of a wonderful bequest. An American benefactor donated to the library her collection of early Scottish books, including a very rare first edition (‘the Kilmarnock edition’) of Robert Burns’ poems, and a volume by the medieval philosopher, Duns Scotus, printed in Venice way back in 1476, and later minutely annotated in the margins by Bavarian monks.

Among all these treasures, there is one I have been drawn to on every visit, The Borrowers’ Register, which details every loan from 1747 to 1968. The register records not just the book and the name of the borrower, but also their address and frequently their occupation. Reading the register brings home the wonder of the institution – a free library, open to all.

One of the borrowers was young Robert Stirling, the son of a local farmer and the inventor of the Stirling Engine, a descendent of which is the free-piston, nuclear-powered engine that NASA plan to use for flights into deep space. As well as local school children, teachers and clergymen were also frequent borrowers.. But Scotland was the first-ever, literate, peasant society: among the library borrowers were farmers, servants, quarriers, millers, barbers, gardeners, glovers, masons and hand-loom weavers. There were more weavers among the borrowers than there were ministers. After a hard days labour, they would walk miles through the snow or the glaur to borrow Shakespeare’s Sonnets to read by the dim light of their cruisie lamps.

I don’t know if there was balm or treacle in Gilead, but there was balm for the poor in that corner of rural of Perthshire. And there’s balm for me in The Borrowers’ Register.

*Graham Balfour (1901), The Life Of Robert Louis Stevenson. London: Methuen.

Michael Bloor

More information can be found at https: innerpeffraylibrary.co.uk

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Banner Image – Pot Pourrie – a mass of coloured petals from pixabay.com

Article Image:The Innerpeffray Library by M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons – A square two storey building with three windows on the ground floor and an ornamental arched window above. The walls are rendered white under a slate roof.