The book club’s first season is titled “The Founders, Revisited.” Inspired by rare books and manuscripts in the Rosenbach and Carpenters’ Hall collections, this season’s book club meetings will critically examine the contributions and complicated legacies of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Frederick Douglass, and Benjamin Rush. 

In this two-hour, immersive, hands-on workshop, distinguished local Irish American calligrapher and manuscript illuminator Susan Kelly vonMedicus will introduce you to Irish manuscript heritage and teach the Uncial script found in the Book of Kells and other early Irish manuscripts.

In this four-week course, we’ll journey into the pages of Wuthering Heights, the beloved novel written and published by Emily Brontë in 1847.

The Rosenbach holds in its collection the original serial parts of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  Throughout this course, we’ll read the existing six serial parts as the first readers did, one part at a time for six sessions, then we’ll spend a final session discussing the many ways Dickens could have unspooled his final mystery, perhaps even solving the mystery of Edwin Drood itself.    

This tour features the Rosenbach’s collections from Mexico and Texas, including materials from the Spanish Empire, the early years of Mexican independence, and relations with the expanding United States in the 1800s.

This engaging seminar, held in the Rosenbach’s historic house, will begin with a discussion of how slavery helped shape the Constitution, which ironically, was written in Pennsylvania–the first state in the nation and the first political jurisdiction in the Western World to take steps to end slavery. 

Rosenbacchanal 2025: The Power of the Book will feature a conversation between writer and essayist Adam Gopnik, best known as a staff writer at The New Yorker for the past forty years, and Honoree Arthur Spector, the Rosenbach’s Chair Emeritus. Their discussion will explore the allure, the potency, and the omnipresence of one the most powerful objects the world has ever known: the book.

Mathematician and cleric Charles Lutwidge Dodgson published children’s books under the pen name Lewis Carroll. This tour explores both the man and the author with the help of letters from Dodgson to his publishers, original drawings by John Tenniel (the illustrator of the Alice books), photographs of children taken by Dodgson, and of course, copies of his books.

Persuasion is often considered Austen’s autumnal novel, her most mature work, and a farewell to her life as a fiction writer. In this course, we will examine the many ways in which she deploys her satire, and we will explore the novel’s themes of heartbreak, hope, personal growth, and second-chance love.  

November 16, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
December 14, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
January 11, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
February 15, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
March 15, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
April 19, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
May 17, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
June 21, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Our Sherlock Mondays Biblioventure was such a success, we’ve decided to continue exploring the Sherlockian canon with Sherlock Monthly. Every month, we’ll focus on one Sherlock Holmes adventure in the order they were first published.

When high school English students connect with the Rosenbach's collection of rare editions and personal letters, they learn that Emily Dickinson was more than an isolated woman with a severe hairstyle and a long white dress…

For modern readers, the great secret of the Victorian cultural world is that lady detective characters were among the most popular in the literature of the time. In this course, we will explore many of the most popular of these characters and interrogate how they reflected the spectrum of Victorian attitudes about women and how they both played into and resisted conventional Victorian conceptions of (and anxieties about) female ability, acumen, psychology, and labor.  

This course on Midsummer Night’s Dream will be an interactive experience and will rely on your participation, enthusiasm, and free-flowing conversations. Each time we meet, we will practice a variety of reading techniques that will enable you to begin experiencing Midsummer (and eventually all of Shakespeare’s plays) more deeply and effectively on your own. 

Faulkner’s Light in August dives into the darkest corners of American history: religious fanaticism, racism, the horror of the Civil War, and the brutal legacy of lynching. In this bold masterpiece, Faulkner plays with time’s unbreakable grip.

In this Behind the Bookcase tour, we will read a selection of letters that follow the four-decade professional relationship of Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach and Belle da Costa Greene, J. Pierpont Morgan’s librarian and inaugural director of the Pierpont Morgan Library (now the Morgan Library & Museum).

Join the Rosenbach for a special seminar on Jewish women’s history in the beautiful parlor of the Rosenbach brothers’ home on Delancey Place. Led by gifted teacher and scholar Melissa Klapper, the course explores the new book The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai.

Join yogi Liza Seltzer and Rosenbach John C. Haas Director Kelsey Scouten Bates for this poetry-inspired yin yoga practice. You’ll be guided into passive, longer-held poses that invoke both stillness and openness in body and mind; you’ll listen from this place of openness to the writing poet Charles Hanson Towne describes in his introduction to Moods as having “a haunting quality, a breath of mystery, as though a ghost walked into a garden.” 

In this tour we will explore the life and works of this radical, proto-feminist, and quintessential Romantic as we sift through early editions of her works, along with manuscripts and letters of her husband, poet Percy Shelley, and the couple’s questionable company.

Join Andalusia, the Rosenbach, and the Alliance Française de Philadelphie for a special opportunity to spend an afternoon in the library of one of early America’s most important intellects, engaging with his collection of 18th-century books.  

Experience the thrill of historical bookbinding at this workshop, where you will make your own unique journal with the guidance of Ramon Townsend, a local master bookbinder.

November 16, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
December 14, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
January 11, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
February 15, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
March 15, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
April 19, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
May 17, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
June 21, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Our Sherlock Mondays Biblioventure was such a success, we’ve decided to continue exploring the Sherlockian canon with Sherlock Monthly. Every month, we’ll focus on one Sherlock Holmes adventure in the order they were first published.

Join us and Plain Wrapper Press Redux publisher, Mark Fischer, at a Members Event centered on Uncle Umberto’s Orchard by Frederic Tuten.

In this course, we’ll explore how great poets across the centuries have used the sonnet. Authors will likely include William Shakespeare, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Keats, Christina Rosetti, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Terrance Hayes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wanda Coleman, William Butler Yeats, and Percy Shelley. This course will be enjoyable for both people who are new to reading poetry and aficionados alike. 

This is the third and final session of this series of The Body in the Library Book Club. In this series we celebrate the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance by rediscovering talented mystery writers from the era, and then engage with recent mystery novels set in early 20th-century Harlem. During this session we will be focusing on Nekesa Afia’s, Dead Dead Girls (2021)

In this hands-on printing workshop, you will use a tabletop press to create your own, personal copies of U.S. founding documents–such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—complemented by a selection of important engravings from the Rosenbach’s holdings. 

In this tour, we’ll connect historical treasures of the Rosenbach collections to the contemporary creative field of Book Arts.

This two-hour workshop, co-led by yogi Liza Seltzer and Rosenbach John C. Haas Director Kelsey Scouten Bates, will introduce you to de Acosta’s work and legacy and invite you to take a deep dive into what it means to be truly authentic.

Esteemed civil rights scholar john a. powell offers a framework for building connection across differences through the practice of bridging.

This tour will explore the global, cross-cultural connections forged via the thriving tea market in Europe in the 1600s and 1700s, as well as the role tea drinking played in the cultural history of the British Empire.