Scottish Library History

Libraries in Scottish history, the bigger picture

Scotland was a pioneer in developing public library traditions and we can be proud of our past which laid the foundations for our modern public library service.

Scotland’s first public library was founded at Innerpeffray in rural Perthshire near Crieff in 1680 by Lord Madertie, a local laird who left his own collection of books as the basis of the library. A fine library building was subsequently erected in the 1760s which still survives today and is well worth visiting. At Dunblane which is not far from Innerpeffray Scotland’s only cathedral library was begun in 1684. It, too still survives and can be visited. There then followed several other libraries founded by wealthy patrons. These are collectively known as endowed libraries because they were founded by wealthy patrons.

In 1725 a new and now forgotten type of library appeared in Edinburgh. This was a circulating library which a purely commercial venture begun by a successful businessman and poet, Allan Ramsay, himself a native of Leadhills. He was a bookseller and began to lend out his books in return for a subscription. The idea caught on in Scotland’s other cities and large towns and some began to develop specialist services including books in foreign languages and music. However this service was expensive and not suited to ordinary people.

The type of library which emerged next and became the commonest type of library in Scotland until the end of the nineteenth century was the subscription library. It functioned like a club or society and members paid an annual subscription and elected office bearers who administered the library and selected the books often with the advice of members. There were two types, subscription libraries for the better off which charged a high annual subscription and those for poorer people, usually tradesmen which cost only a few shillings a year. Leadhills Miners’ Library and Wanlockhead Miners’ Library were early and untypical examples of working class libraries but they became much more common in the 1790s.

The first middle class subscription library appeared at Kelso in 1750 and they became common in market towns. Rate supported public libraries were a much later development, not appearing until the 1850s and did not become common until the end of the nineteenth century