This is a free program.

• Episodes stream live one Saturday per month beginning September 12, 2026 from 2:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m. ET, with the recordings available to watch afterward on the Rosenbach’s YouTube channel: Sherlock Monthly Playlist

Description

The new season of Sherlock Monthly continues our exploration of the Sherlockian canon. Every month, we focus on one Sherlock Holmes adventure in the order they were first published. We begin this season with “The Adventure of the Dying Detective.” Joining host Edward G. Pettit are some new cohosts and some old friends. You can watch the livestream on Saturday afternoons or the recordings on our YouTube channel.    

The Rosenbach holds in its collections first editions of some of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books, as well as the handwritten manuscript of “The Adventure of the Empty House.”  Our founder, Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, was deeply committed to mystery and crime literature, corresponded with the famous Sherlockian and founder of the Baker Street Irregulars, Christopher Morley, and once purchased Doyle’s personal crime library. 

Whether you are a seasoned Sherlockian who has read the entire canon, or an aficionado of the various screen portrayals of Sherlock, all are welcome to join us for this one-of-a-kind Biblioventure, live every month (or watch the recordings) and running until we finish the canon.

Watch past episodes here: 

Sherlock Mondays Playlist (episodes 1-32) 

The Hound of the Baskervilles Playlist (8 episodes)  

Sherlock Monthly Playlist (episodes 33-current) 

This Season’s Schedule

2026

Sept. 12 |  Ep. 50, “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” (December 1913) with cohosts Erica Fair and Lee Shackleford

Dying Detective Strand Magazine

Oct. 10 | Ep. 51, “The Valley of Fear” Part 1 (Part 1, Chs. 1-5, September-November 1914) with cohosts Crystal Noll and Monica Schmidt  

Nov. 14 | Ep. 52, “The Valley of Fear” Part 2 (Part 1, Chs. 6-7; Part 2, Chs 1-2, December 1914-February 1915) with cohosts Mark Jones and Paul M. Chapman 

Dec. 12 | Ep. 53, “The Valley of Fear” Part 3 (Part 2, Chs. 3-Epilogue, March 1915-May 1915) with cohosts Peter Eckrich and Chris Zordan

2027

Jan. 9 | Ep. 54, “His Last Bow” (September 1917) with cohosts Tiffany Knight and Art Taylor      

Feb. 13 |  Ep. 55, “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” (October 1921) with cohosts Steve Mason, Max Magee, and Anastasia Klimchynskaya

Mar. 13 | Ep. 56, “The Problem of Thor Bridge” (February 1922) with cohosts Shana Carter and Mary Alcaro

Apr. 10 | Ep. 57, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” (March 1923) with cohosts Olivia Rutigliano and Robert Katz   

May 8 | Ep. 58, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” (January 1924) with cohosts P.J. Sullivan and Michael McSwiggin 

Sponsors

This season of the Rosenbach’s Biblioventures: Sherlock Monthly program is generously sponsored by Lisa Washington.

Series Host

Edward G. Pettit is the Sunstein Senior Manager of Digital Initiatives at the Rosenbach and has been presenter for the weekly Biblioventures series – Sundays with Dracula, Sundays with Frankenstein, Sundays with Jane Eyre, Austen Mondays: Pride and Prejudice, Monsters and Ghosts: Jekyll & Hyde and A Christmas Carol, The Hobbit – and also Pickwick Monthly. Pettit has taught many reading courses at the Rosenbach on many authors and books, including the Sherlock Holmes stories, Dracula, Frankenstein, the novels of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Philadelphia Gothic. He is a member of the Philadelphia Baker Street Irregulars scion society, The Sons of the Copper Beeches, serving as the Recorder of Pedigrees, as has probably never read a Sherlock Holmes story without smoking a pipe.  

Series Cohosts

Sept. 12 |  Ep. 50, “The Adventure of the Dying Detective”

Erica Fair is a trial attorney and amateur historian in Minneapolis, with a special interest in Victorian medicine. She received both her bachelor's and J.D. from the University of Minnesota, where she walked past the Andersen Library collection every day for six years.  Erica first read and loved the Canon at age 12, but waited twenty years to join the Sherlockian community, and is looking to make up for lost time!  She is an active member of the Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota, where she is a frequent columnist for the Explorations newsletter, and writes a medical history article each year for the scion's Christmas Annual. Online, Erica can be found with the Afghanistan Perceivers of Tulsa and many other Zoom scions, where her two dogs often make guest appearances.

Lee Eric Shackleford, BSI ("Woodman's Lee"), is an award-winning writer and performer for stage, screen, and audio drama. He is the author of the play Holmes & Watson, the creator of the webseries pilot Herlock, and the mischievous mind behind many playful Sherlockian cartoons, articles, and pastiches. Once upon a time, he helped Moriarty get out of the holodeck on Star Trek: the Next Generation. A proud member of the Doyle/Wodehouse scion The Clients of Adrian Mulliner, Lee currently resides in North Carolina, where he is continually tweaking the website www.shacklefordfreelance.com.

Oct. 10 | Ep. 51, “The Valley of Fear” Part 1

Monica M. Schmidt, BSI, ASH (“Julia Stoner,” “The Church of St. Monica”) lives in Iowa, where she serves as president of The Younger Stamfords of Iowa City and is a member of nearly three dozen Sherlockian scions and societies across the United States, Canada, and the UK. When she isn’t immersed in the Canon, Monica is a licensed mental health counselor in private practice specializing in addiction treatment, a film critic for Cedar Rapids radio station KCCK, an enthusiastic—and occasionally embattled—landscaper with her husband, and a cricket player. She maintains that all of these pursuits require roughly equal measures of observation, patience, and questionable judgment.

Nov. 14 | Ep. 52, “The Valley of Fear” Part 2

Paul M. Chapman and Mark Jones (BSI, MBt, ASH) host the very popular podcast, Doings of Doyle, dedicated to the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Professor Challenger, Brigadier Gerard and Sherlock Holmes. Recently, they founded The Haunted Archive: the Annotated Ghost Story Manuscripts of M.R. James and published first volume on “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” Paul has written widely on Victorian and Edwardian genre literature, with a particular focus on the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, J. S. Le Fanu and M. R. James. He was a staff writer on Sherlock magazine for ten years, and edited The Ritual for the Northern Musgraves Sherlock Holmes Society. He is also the author of Birth of a Legend: Count Dracula, Bram Stoker and Whitby, and has contributed articles and reviews to ACD: The Journal of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society, The Musgrave Papers, All Hallows, Ghosts & Scholars and Wormwood. Mark has been fascinated by the works of Arthur Conan Doyle since he read the canon one wet summer holiday as a twelve-year-old. He has written widely on Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, including for The Baker Street Journal, The Serpentine Muse and Canadian Holmes and is the new Commissioning Editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal. His most recent book is Conan Doyle: Mystery and Adventure (2023) which tells the story of a long-lost BBC TV series of Conan Doyle adaptations from the late sixties. He is co-host, with Paul M. Chapman, of Doings of Doyle - The Arthur Conan Doyle Podcast  (www.doingsofdoyle.com). A lapsed-historian, he lives in York, UK, and helps universities to improve teaching and learning on campus and online.

Dec. 12 | Ep. 53, “The Valley of Fear” Part 3

Jan. 9 | Ep. 54, “His Last Bow”

Art Taylor leads the course “Sherlock” at George Mason University—emphasizing to his students that’s he’s more of an enthusiast than an authority, but always with the goal of encouraging their own enthusiasm too. While he enjoyed some of the best-known Sherlock Holmes stories in his younger days, he only read the full canon—aloud—after he and his wife exited the first Robert Downey Jr. adaptation and she remarked, “That was fun. I wonder if the original stories are any good.” He’s a member of the Red Circle of Washington DC, the Beacon Society, Watson’s Tin Box and The Noble Correspondents, and he’s presented talks at Watson’s Tin Box and at the annual “Saturday with Sherlock Holmes" at the Pratt Library in Baltimore. His short fiction has won the Edgar, Agatha, Derringer, and Macavity Awards, and he was the 2025 recipient of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement. 

Feb. 13 |  Ep. 55, “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone”

Steve Mason has considered himself a Sherlockian since the first time he found his Father’s copy of the Hound of the Baskervilles at seven years old… imagine if it had been a copy of Playboy.  He worked for the Environmental Protection Agency for 35 years in the emergency response program. He is currently head of the Crew of the Barque Lone Star scion society, chair of the Communications Committee for the Beacon Society, and co-founder of the Baker Street Elementary comic strip. 

Maximilian Magee, PSI ("Agent Tobias Athelney") is the social chair of the Notorious Canary-Trainers of Madison, Wisconsin, and leads a group known as Comrades of The Order and its spin-off SPODE scion Captain Basil's Mignonettes. In 2021, he attended his first BSI weekend and has never looked back. He's a [hyper] active member of the Hounds of the Internet, frequent visitor- and member of- the Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota, he's also the "Gopher" Yeoman Purser of the Torists International S.S. of Chicago. His background, education, and work experience in tech has led to all sorts of weird and interesting Sherlockian projects, like an e-re-serialization of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and using A.I. and computer science to analyze, dissect, and discuss the Canon. Max holds a B.S. in Engineering Mechanics and Astronautics from the University of Wisconsin, has worked as a Flight Design Engineer and Flight Controller at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, and worked as the CTO of a cloud A.I. startup, is currently a Manager of Software Development at a local Madison software company, and he's a third-degree black belt and teacher of Kuk Sool Won and former world-champion in bong (the Korean martial art long-staff). Max was a cohost on the special subscription Sherlock Mondays: The Hound of the Baskervilles and also a cohost for the Biblioventures Monsters and Ghosts: A Christmas Carol. 

Mar. 13 | Ep. 56, “The Problem of Thor Bridge”

Mary Alcaro recently received her PhD from the Department of English at Rutgers University and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College. An avid Sherlockian, Mary has been invested in the Baker Street Irregulars (BSI) and Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes (ASH), and is the Head Mastiff of The Sons of the Copper Beeches, Philadelphia’s Sherlockian scion society. She has contributed essays to several books on various Sherlockian topics. Mary is also a bartender and created the Sher-locktails on Sherlock Mondays.

Apr. 10 | Ep. 57, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man”

Olivia Rutigliano is an Editor at Lit Hub and its vertical CrimeReads. She was a Contributing Editor at the film magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room, and has written essays for Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Baffler, Politics/Letters, The Toast, Truly Adventurous, and elsewhere. She is a specialist in the history of mass entertainment from the late 19th through the 20th centuries and has a PhD from the departments of English/Comparative Literature and Theatre at Columbia University, where she was the Marion E. Ponsford fellow. Olivia has been a cohost for the Rosenbach’s Biblioventures, Monsters and Ghosts and Sherlock Mondays and recently led an online seminar on Victorian Female Detectives. 

Bob Katz (standing next to the piper) is a retired physician/pathologist, residing in NJ. A lifelong Sherlockian, he's been a member of the Baker Street Irregulars ("Dr. Ainstree") for five decades. His writings (and editorial work) have appeared in a variety of publications including The Baker Street Journal, BSI Press (where he also served as Co-Publisher) and other journals and tomes. He is currently the Cartwright of The Baker Street Irregulars, Headmastiff Emeritus of The Sons of the Copper Beeches, a member of the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes ("Dr. Jackson"), and a member of various other scions and organizations. He also spends what remains of his spare time pursuing arcane and outre old movies, as well as remaining an avid student of the American Civil War.

May 8 | Ep. 58, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”

Pamela (PJ) Sullivan is the co-editor of the Baker Street Almanac, dedicated to chronicling the doings of Sherlockian organizations worldwide, with a mission not just to record but to share and thereby strengthen the fellowship among these like-minded folk.  A life-long Holmes aficionado, PJ has created in her home a replica 221b Baker Street Sitting Room and has enjoyed hosting tours for fellow Sherlockians. Visitors to PJ’s Baker Street are able to lounge in the basket chair by the fireplace, reading telegrams, leafing through old volumes, and exploring the detritus of Holmes’ cases (a secret naval treaty! – a gold pince-nez! – a harpoon!).  PJ is a member of The Cornish Horrors (RI), The Men on the Tor (CT), The Sherlockians of Baltimore (MD), and the Baker Street Irregulars.