You're probably talking about
Thirty Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons, with a foreward by Vin Diesel. It's still dirt cheap on Amazon, if you want a copy.
These focus more on the history of RPGS in general, but D&D is inexorably meshed with the more general history so they're definitely relevant:
Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Roleplaying Games, by Lawrence Shick is probably the best index of pre-1990s RPGs, with some brief histories.
The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games by Rick Swan is similar but less comprehensive.
The Fantasy Roleplaying Gamer's Bible by Sean Patrick Fannon covers the origins of the hobby, from wargaming on.
A History of Role-Playing by Steve Darlington is another easily accessible source:
http://ptgptb.org/0001/history1.html
Shared Fantasy: Roleplaying Games as Social Worlds by Gary Alan Fine is a sociological study from the 1980s about RPGs, with some history.
The Brief History of Game column, by Shannon Applecline focuses on companies instead of the industry as a whole and is more recent, but has some good research:
http://www.rpg.net/columns/list-column.phtml?colname=briefhistory