Does anybody know which is the book Peter slams on the table behind Egon in the library scene?
I’m invested now and need to know as well.
The Oxford English Dictionary?
Ooooh, I think you may be right.
Yeah, that’s totally it.
Well I had to get one right eventually. Didn’t I? I mean, it’s just math. 
Uhm… good bet, but I’m afraid it isn’t… It’s missing the Oxford emblem and both “The Oxford” words are usually in its first line…
And it should be something with much more volumes, because we’re in front of the RR to RXI? volume? that’s a huge set of volumes!
I applied a perspective correction tool and I have to admit that “THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY” matches de text perfectly! maybe an illustrated edition?
Looks like there might be a sticker or post-it over the emblem? Possibly to avoid rights issues?
EDIT: Or it’s just a library sticker, isn’t it?! Whoops!
I’m going to agree about The Oxford English Dictionary, but I disagree about the word below that being “Illustrated”.
The third character looks like a / symbol, so I feel like it’s two short words, or just groups of letters, separated by a slash.
Below that, I think I see a 2 over a C.
Then further down:
a star followed by PR-RHI [indicating the starting letters of all the words contained in the volume]
a small symbol
and finally what appears to be a year. Possibly 1957?
Here’s an approximation, though some of it is pure gibberish.
And Rob, I do think it’s a sticker but my gut feeling is that it wasn’t added by the moviemakers, but is rather just some part of the library’s filing system. A color-code or something similar. [EDIT: You made the same comment while I was editing mine. We’re parallel today.]
Alex
As said, it can’t be “illustrated”, there’s no one for the Dictionary, there’s only illustrated for the Universal Dictionary… may it be “Volume ??”?
I think the bottom text is the year, but I bet for 1933… that year there was a reprint of the first edition with a supplement… but only 12 volumes A-B/C/D-E/F-G/H-K/L-M/N-Poy/Poy-Ry/S-Soldo/Sole-Sz/T-U/V-Z (Another 4 supplements were published between 1972 and 1986… A-G/H-N/O-Scz/Se-Z)… Nothing matches “RR-RXI” or similar…
Anybody near NY to take a visit to the Library?
Uhm… MURRAY’S ENGLISH DICTIONARY has a second volume only for the “C”… 2-C written in vertical… and also has blue covers on some editions…
But I still on the OXFORD one… it also has the 2C volume… and text is definitively a better match
lmao
DELETE
I believe the text reads
THE
OXFORD
ENGLISH
DICTIONARY
MURRAY
2
c
(unknown)
1933
We see here: Oxford English Dictionary - Wikipedia that the OED’s volume 2 lines up with C and that a full set was published in 1933. It is my opinion that the book cover is a result of an after market library binding or a replacement cover because if the cover was original to the book there should have been the Oxford crest.
That appears to be the Dewey-Decimal designation.
I’ve no idea if America has a differing Dewey classificiation system to the UK, but the dictionaries in my library are classified as R423 - R433.
The first bit does look like RR, which might be the NYPL’s way of denoting their reference books.
My wife has her masters in Library Science, so I thought I’d have her chime in on this.
What she thinks the set of characters toward the bottom with the asterisk shows what the letter range on that volume is.
She says that while a dictionary could have a Dewey Decimal number (or Library of Congress depending on what system they used) this one doesn’t appear to have that. Or at the very least it’s not on the spine. That kind of marking is not normally printed on the book.
That was my assumption as well. See above.
My best-guess is that it’s for the volume containing words beginning with ‘pr’ through ‘rhi’.
*PR-RHI
Alex
Anyone find out anything new? I have joined the hunt.