Reddit reviews The Star Wars Encyclopedia

I've always been a fan of Star Wars. Growing up as a kid I got a copy of the Star Wars Encyclopedia for my birthday and I perused it constantly, reading basically every entry. I started reading the New Jedi Order books in middle school and kept reading the succeeding book series until I got to Legacy of the Force, I think. I think I got up to the book where they killed Mara Jade and the next one hadn't come out yet. Since I was still pretty young, the wait, and the fact that they were taking a weird tone with the books (it didn't feel so Star Wars-y, but more like a soap opera), made me not so engaged with the series. So I kind of stopped interacting with the Expanded Universe for awhile.

What changed that was actually the Star Wars: Old Republic game, sad as it is to say. I had been wanting some games to play in my free time and found out that the game was free to play. Then I found Knights of the Old Republic II at a used game store and figured that since I had been enjoying SWTOR enough that KOTORII should be a good buy. I loved it to pieces for its interesting take on the old familiar mythos. Not only did it kind of get me back into Star Wars but it got me more into gaming because I started to want to play other games by Obsidian Entertainment--I knew Chris Avellone had a lot of talent. So I got Fallout New Vegas and played a ton of that game and loved it to pieces.

It sounds like you are referring to the Star Wars Encyclopedia, but the cover is a bit different than you described. If you want a book with the most amount of Star Wars information, you want The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia. It's a 3 volume update of the original book and contains just about everything from 1977 to 2008. Fair warning: large sections of these books are no longer canon as of 2014. If you are looking for an exhaustively extensive source of all things Star Wars, be it Legends (old EU) or current canon, check out Wookieepedia.