I recently purchased the book “Issues in Contemporary Literary Criticism”. It is featured very briefly in the library sequence on Alice’s cart. I was able to find it on eBay for $16 shipped and it now has a home in my display next to Egon’s voltmeter for now. Given the size and shape of the books she carries down to the basement area, this is not one of them and is featured on the cart only.
Was also able to pick this book up for a very reasonable cost. The condition is a little rough, but that is to be expected for a book that is as old as I am.
Here is one more seen in Frozen Empire
I also was able to obtain the magazine shown on the counter during the YHS set walk through video. I have not seen it in the movie yet
So far the books seen in Frozen Empire are old enough to have been around in 89 and even 84. I have a few more on the way so stay tuned!
Let’s just say, I myself have had some ‘small success’ tracking down books featured on screen.
A Small Success:
https://youtu.be/RWgTpo9bBzY?si=-AdX_CFmID12XJKx
Who’s On First:
https://youtu.be/xobroggHNGM?si=RLk8xljuB-09KyA-
I’ve also got a small collection of various magazines seen on screen, if those interest you.
Alex
How fun! I have been combing through the library scene to see what to pick up next. Thanks for sharing!
One time a book on the shelf in the ‘Listen, you smell something?’ scene caught my eye.
I took a pic of the screen, zoomed in, figured out the title and author, did an internet search, and got ONE hit.
I clicked on the link. You know what the one hit was?
A post that I myself had made here in the forums, from like five years earlier, mentioning me wanting to find that book.
It had been so long, I had no memory of it having already caught my eye.
Alex
This thread keeps making my neurons fire remembering other books/magazines that I’ve tracked down over the years.
I wanted to collect them all into one album on Facebook for future reference. I thought you might like to see the pics here, though of course all FB photos linked in this forum tend to die very quickly, so enjoy them while you can.
[I also added some to the two above posts.]
First of all, I would LOVE someone to identify what book the Librarian Ghost is reading. I always think of the poor rotoscope artist who had to keep her hands transparent and the book opaque.
Scan from Making Ghostbusters:
Photo of my TV with Blu-Ray playing:
Can anybody figure out what book that is? Or even what the illustrations depict?
Now then, one of the easiest magazines to identify was likewise one of the first ones I ever bought for my prop collection.
Once I owned a copy, I realized something… when Janine folds the magazine back on itself for a couple of frames while flirting with Egon, you get a glimpse of which article she was reading. So that person with their elbow on a tree is actually the real-life mayor of NYC at the time, Ed Koch.
This being a movie where there’s a different fictitious mayor, that’s a teeny-tiny continuity error.
You likely all know about Janine’s issue of Cosmo in GBII. That’s Jill Goodacre on the cover. (She was once stranded in an ATM vestibule in NYC during a blackout. Could I BE any more trivial?)
What you may not know, however, is that Janine actually has an issue of Cosmo in the first film as well.
In the “We got one!” scene, you can see a magazine on her desk, and can even make out the name Cosmopollitan without too much trouble. I digitally rotated and stretched it, then compared it to every cover of Cosmo from 1983/1984 until I got one that looked like a match.
Here’s a really obscure one. In the lockup scene, one of the incarcerated men is reading a Newsweek article about the death penalty.
In GBII, we see a book and a magazine on Louis Tully’s desk.
I could see him reading the Further Prophecies of Nostradamus, but did he borrow the Glamour from Janine?
Ten years ago, I did a fairly popular one-minute video to accompany the Janine phone message that Annie Potts recorded.
https://youtu.be/kELECtxcmaM?si=7n5KbvFWzwudnaXc
I was tickled that viewers commented on the fact she was still reading the same magazines thirty years later.
Notice that I also threw in the Nostradamus book. It wasn’t one of Janine’s, but in my mind it was a reciprocation of her loaning him the Glamour.
Alex
This is great! I was looking for the book that is next to Dana’s TV, glad you have already done the heavy lifting and are sharing the information!
Happy to share. My collection is filled with things that other people have ID’ed and then shared the knowledge, so I enjoy returning the same favor to the rest of the community. We’re all standing on the shoulders of the others here. Although along the way I have hit a few bumps of bad IDs.
From 2011 to 2017, I made seven purchases to get the pic on the right as accurate as possible, though you only see four items being modeled by my son Zak.
The Panasonic camera was already ID’ed when I joined this forum. I made a bad guess as to the shoulder-slung VCR unit which I had to retract years later with a video entitled “Mistakes Were Made”. The correct Quasar unit was ID’ed by ‘Ryan the Ghostbuster’ in 2016; I had to buy it twice a month apart to get the elusive strap. The Gloverall jacket was ID’ed by a fan named ‘Caison’ in France. I bought three before I matched the color and size correctly, though I still need to transfer a collar button from the ill-fitting one to the otherwise perfect one.
One of my most recent acquisitions was ID'ed by a friend named Dagobah Don on the RPF forums. He said he was happy to repay me after all the 'what model is...?' questions that I'd answered for him over the years. It's a York DCR-92.
But getting back to books, here’s something I forgot to include above because it’s not featured ‘on screen’ per se.
However, they DO talk about it in the commentary track of the movie.
As Harold Ramis says (about twenty-four minutes in), “We were thinking about what would be the center of the disturbance… different kinds of buildings or places all over the city… I remembered a rooftop in St. Louis which was a replica of a temple, and we started talking about the rooftops of New York. And someone produced a coffee table book called [Reitman interjects “Gargoyles and”] Rooftops of New York. And we saw all these interesting temples on tops of buildings and strange Gothic structures and they went with that as a design concept. Very interesting, I thought.”
This book was the nearest thing I could find, so I purchased one from Thriftbooks for $4.26 about five years ago.
When I posted pics to my Facebook, I got a private message from a friend who had been working on a fan-made GB documentary saying I’d scooped them, because they’d gotten confirmation (from Violet Ramis I think) that this was the correct book.
One interesting photo in the book is this bit of skywriting:
Such a specific word. I wondered then, could this 1982 photo be the reason that the filmmakers coined the term ‘Terror Dog’?
Alex
Related Content:
I have one of the Floating Book rigs from the library scene in my collection
The book is “Connecticut Yankee - An Autobiography by Wilbur Cross”
Talk about random LOL
Wow this is great! Any chance you can share a picture of the cover and edition?
I think I found it, it is the 1943 edition that has the same color as your picture of the floating rig… purchased!
I have that Top of the City book, it’s a genuinely good read!
My holy grail, although I really don’t know why, is the A Year on Ice book from GB2’s “she cleaned!” scene. Something about it always caught my eye and imagination, even though I know less than nothing about ice hockey!
Meanwhile, for the true completist, Trout Tactics from the same scene is currently on Amazon UK for under £40!
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Humphreyss-Trout-Tactics-Joseph-Humphreys/dp/0811720799
Finally got these two in today, I think the Frozen Empire collection is as complete as it is going to get. The funny thing is these are all old enough to have been around for 84.
If you get the Curses & Spells book below them, this would make a great display for the life-sized Hasbro mini-Puft toys. Throw in a 9 volt Duracell and some pencils, boom, you’re done.
Alex
I got my copy of Connecticut Yankee today!! Thank you so much ZedR for providing the info! I might have to try to reproduce the floating rig to display this book 
I think it is the upper blue book shown in the floating scene. I have been trying to ID the lower book but have not yet had any success.
May have spotted Man Myth Magic on the counter. There is a flat blue item next to Ray’s right arm and the credit card reader is also shown in the shot but has been moved to the left next to the mug.
The profile and color of the item by Ray’s right arm are very similar to the magazine, it is plausible the magazine is present in the scene given it was on set.
A crown jewel has been added to my collection! The Great Book of Magical Art. This is the book Egon reads from at Ray’s Occult - “This one’s interesting, Ray. Berlin, 1939. A flower cart took off by itself, rolled half a kilometer. Three hundred eyewitnesses.” However this passage is not actually part of the book but was inspired by the 1939 on the title page.
I made another fun find this evening poring over the YHS video from when they visited the set of Ray’s Occult. Peter Aykroyd’s book is actually on set! I bought this book over a year ago to read for fun, but it also now fits into my movie collection.
My copy is also marked with my foil seal from Ray’s 
Some additional books and skull bottle that are spotted on the shelf behind the counter at Ray’s Occult:
This is part of my Occult Books project that is coming along, which may have to be its own subject at a later date.