But the sides were shifting. The year 1980, when the “Handbook” appeared, was a weird in-between moment in American culture. The decade had arrived on the calendar but not quite in the zeitgeist. Jimmy Carter was still president; the book appeared in stores just a few months after Ronald Reagan was nominated in a Detroit convention hall a short drive from my home.

The book seemed to rise on the updrafts of his election and the pop-culture shift that accompanied it, from the underdog sympathies of the 1970s to overdog fantasies like “Dynasty,” from hating the rich to envying them to loving them.

The “Handbook” was one of the first touchstones of an era that celebrated coveting, from the bubbly home tours of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” to the upscale-aspiration of MTV’s early videos. It was O.K. to want stuff again. This was a shift with broad social and political implications, even if at the time, I saw those reflected mostly in my classmates with their dumb alligator shirts.

I’ve been thinking about this period a lot over the past couple years, while writing a book that involved diving into the cultural history of the 1980s. For research, I dug up the “Handbook,” no longer an easy feat; the decade-defining icon has been relegated to used-book bins.

The book I read was little like the one I’d let live rent-free in my head. Yes, on the surface, it’s a how-to guide to prep life, with vast, closely observed entries on picking the proper school, the proper clothing, the proper pet (a dog). There’s a page on caring for genuine madras (it needs a 24-hour soak in cold salt water[!] before first washing) and one devoted entirely to ducks (“the most beloved of all totems”).

But it’s also trenchant and hilarious. It can be as cutting as Lucille Bluth on her third martini. Birnbach — no lock-jawed Connecticut Mayflower descendant but a Jewish New Yorker who took on the book project as a 21-year-old Village Voice writer — approached it, she would later say, as an “insider-outsider.”