About 8 years ago a "virgin" first printing Big Book in the original sealed shipping box was bought at auction for well over $10,000, and the buyer did not even open the box to verify the book was inside, as it is more valuable in the sealed box.

A run of four thousand seven hundred and thirty copies of the Big Book rolled off the press in April 1939. Two-hundred seventy-nine books were distributed without charge.

The dust jacket for the first edition Big Book chosen was red, and yellow, with a little black, and a little white. The words Alcoholics Anonymous were printed across the top in large white script. It became known as the "Circus" jacket because of its loud circus colors.

The first Big Book sold for $3.50 per copy. That was a very large sum in those days, probably the equivalent of about $50 today.

The Four Absolutes
Honesty.......Unselfishness.......Love.......Purity
The Absolutes were borrowed from the Oxford Group Movement

The afternoon of December 11th, 1934, at the age of 39, Bill Wilson staggered up the steps and through the doors of Charles R. Towns Hospital, 293 Central Park West, NY, NY for the last time as an inebriated drunk, waving his last bottle of beer at Dr. "Silky" Silkworth as he was met in the hall. He had been there three times previously to dry out. Bill was admitted at 2:10 pm, and so began the history of Alcoholics Anonymous in Sobriety. From that moment Bill never took another drink of alcohol.

An astounding seventy-five to ninety-three percent of the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous recovered from their seemingly hopeless diseases of alcoholism. They did it by relying on God and by basing their relationship with Him on the principles of the Bible.

For many years, Dr. Bob's Bible was brought to the podium at the beginning of every meeting of the King School Group--Akron No. One.

William Griffith Wilson grew up in a quarry town in Vermont. When he was 10, his hard-drinking father headed for Canada, and his mother moved to Boston, leaving the sickly child with her parents

Dr. Bob had a Pit Bull mix named ROGER

Early drunks played a lot of poker in the sober clubs.
Plain, colored "chips" are still given out today by many groups around the country to signify a "desire" to stop drinking. Other colored chips represent different lengths of sobriety.

Alcoholics Anonymous Gave The One Millionth Copy of the Big Book to Richard Nixon

The 25 millionth copy of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous will be presented to Jill Brown, warden of San Quentin prison.

Find Area 64 AA Meetings online @ http://www.aanashville.org/meetings.html