The pages of the borrowers’ register for Innerpeffray library are crowded with lines of arching inky script. It is open at the year 1870, and notes the prompt return by the schoolgirl Helen Boyd of The Lamplighter, a popular novel about an orphan’s salvation. On the opposite page, the aptly named Thomas Stalker, a local gamekeeper, took home the Lifeworks of Robert Burns.

This register, spanning across two centuries, offers a unique reading history of a rural Perthshire community. It is one of the many quietly astonishing artefacts to be discovered at Scotland’s first free, public lending library, which on Friday receives a funding boost that should allow it to proclaim its treasure trove for bibliophiles more widely.

The library was founded at Innerpeffray, a hamlet to the south of Crieff, by the local landowner David Drummond, the Third Lord Madertie, in 1680. It was a radical move that allowed workers from the nearby farmsteads and large estate houses to explore the collection, as well as clergy, students and schoolchildren. The register reflects borrowers from all strata of society: farmers, weavers, teachers, blacksmiths, scholars and ministers.

Charging his heirs to provide for the library “for time coming”, Drummond also provided for a school to be built next to the chapel, which originally housed the library, pre-empting the 1696 Education Act, one of the final measures of Scotland’s parliament before union with England.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lara Haggerty, Innerpeffray’s library manager and keeper of books. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

In the early 18th century, one of Drummond’s descendants raised funds for a new building to accommodate the expanding collection, which now stands between the chapel and schoolroom. Its high south-facing windows, looking across the strath to the meandering river Earn, flood the first-floor reading room with light even on winter days.

While the borrowing of such rare items is no longer feasible, visiting readers can pass an hour or two examining any of the 5,000 volumes ranging from theology and history to Enlightenment philosophy, or browsing through the first 50 years of the Scots magazine, first published in 1739 and covering events including the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden.

Lara Haggerty, Innerpeffray’s 31st keeper of books, a title bestowed by Drummond, welcomes the funding boost of £100,000 announced on Friday as part of the UK government’s Tay Cities deal, as well as a recent grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, which will make possible improvements to the school room and plans for a woodland trail around the library building.

For Haggerty, one of the delights of the library is the far-sighted generosity of its founder: “The joy of Innerpeffray is its variety. He left such a multi-faceted collection, and he wasn’t didactic about what people should read because he himself read medicine, travel, military history. Nor did he limit who could access the collection. He wanted anyone who can read to benefit from it.”