Thomas G. Fiffer

My first job out of graduate school in 1989 was at Villard Books, a division of Random House. If Dickens had penned a novel on publishing, he might have opened with, “It was both glamorous and grimy.” I was working in New York, where Jay McInerney had just published Bright Lights, Big City, edited by his roommate, Gary Fisketjon, the wunderkind who launched Vintage Contemporaries.

I went to book parties, nibbled hors d’oeuvres, and once spotted Spaulding Gray in a rust-colored linen suit. But as an editorial assistant, I was the lowest of the low, rejecting slush and spending half my day at the copy machine.

There was, however, one amazing perk: free books. So when the new revised edition of the “Random House Encyclopedia” arrived, I snagged a copy of this 11-pound behemoth. My thought, as yet unmarried at 24: when I have kids, they will need this.

Little did I know my first child would come when I was 37, my second four years later. By 2006, the Internet had replaced print for all things factual, and the old red “World Book” volumes of my youth were now quaint artifacts instead of essential reference tools.

Why keep this 3,000-page dinosaur, which serves no function other than to elevate the projector I bought so we could watch movies during quarantine? Because it reminds me of my own Bright Lights, Big City moment, when everything was new and life was waiting to begin just beyond the horizon.