Controlling anonymous user access

I'm building a private site, but we want visitors to be able to have access to a specific set of limited pages.

What I'd like to do would be to provide a shared front page with a login block for registered users to get to the site proper, and limit access for anonymous users beyond that to a very small set of pages. Is there a way to do this in drupal? I've found the front_page contributed module which gets me part of the way there, but I'm sure someone has figured this out before.

Thanks.