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.

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.

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.  

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 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.” 

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.

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).

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.

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. 

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.  

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…

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.    

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.

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.

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. 

This in-depth tour brings us back to the early 18th century as we journey from New York City, home to America’s first Jewish community, to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Together, we’ll meet a vivid cast of characters, learn about a dramatic public spectacle in Harvard Yard, and work with some of Dr. Rosenbach’s treasures of early American Judaica.

On this tour, explore the mythical, enchanting work of the Pre-Raphaelites through the Rosenbach’s collection, and then step into the life of the Pre-Raphaelite’s’ most recognizable muse, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, through the first popularly available edition of her poetry. 

• May 13, 2025 | 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

• June 3, 2025 | 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

• July 8, 2025 | 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

• September 9, 2025 | 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

• October 14, 2025 | 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

• November 11, 2025 | 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

• December 9, 2025 | 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

This special book club season of The Ladies of the House of Love will begin with three iconic Gothic works, including one, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), that Austen heavily satirizes in Northanger Abbey. Then, the club will explore lesser-known books that Austen references as “horrid novels” in Northanger. Finally, on December 9, 2025, just one week before Austen’s 250th birthday, the club will read Northanger Abbey and hold a birthday party for the Authoress.  Don’t miss this unique opportunity to immerse yourself in the world of the Gothic as part of a community of fellow book lovers and Janeites!

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 as we celebrate the June 2025 opening of artist John Y. Wind’s new exhibition, “DEAR JOHN” John Frederick Lewis, John Yaron Wind and the Rosenbach Brothers, that will be featured in the Rosenbach’s newest permanent collection gallery, Treasures from the Rosenbach’s Collection: Judaica, Continental European Literature, the Rosenbachs, & History of the Book. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that rare books and afternoon tea make for a delightful combination! Join the Rosenbach Museum & Library for an unforgettable afternoon voyage into the literary world of Jane Austen.

Acclaimed Joyce scholar Vicki Mahaffey will lead our annual Bloomsday virtual discussion on her new book, The Joyce of Everyday Life.

During this tour, learn how writers such as Lewis Carroll, Eudora Welty and Rudyard Kipling approached the craft of writing.

Join the Rosenbach Board and Delancey Society for our festive annual Spring Soirée.

In this tour, we will meet Queer people from history and consider how their diverse identities shaped their lives and informed their work.

Members are invited to join Kelsey Scouten Bates, The John C. Haas Director of the Rosenbach, and artist John Y. Wind for a fun morning of coffee and conversation.

Every June 16, we gather together to read from Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s a beloved and foundational event for this institution, the home of Joyce’s manuscript of a novel that continues to inspire, scandalize, and thrill.

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 artist John Y. Wind at the Rosenbach’s brand new exhibition, Treasures from the Rosenbach’s Collection: History of the Material Text for a special viewing of his artworks and a tour of the show before stepping outside for a walk to the John Frederick Lewis / John Yaron Wind home on Delancey Place. 

What is the difference between a fake and a forgery? How do either of those differ from a copy? And why does authenticity matter in museum collections? On this tour, we’ll explore these questions by using a wide range of objects in the Rosenbach’s renowned collection.

In this hands-on class, you will learn to create dynamic booklets of your own, from the humble pamphlet to a single-sheet book to the French door zine. No prior zine-making experience is required. 

Join the Rosenbach Museum & Library and the DVLF, Philadelphia’s LGBTQ+ community foundation, for a rare opportunity to step inside Princess Grace’s childhood home for a conversation about George Kelly’s identity as a gay man within a proud Irish Catholic immigrant family that prized traditional masculinity.