This is story about one manuscript rare

News cover This is story about one manuscript rare
01 Oct 2010 03:36:43 In 1939, about 5,000 copies of a book offering hopeless drunks a spiritual path to recovery through 12 steps were released by a fledgling fellowship of alcoholics.
They called it "Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism."
Sales were dismal at first, but interest picked up in 1941 with help from a story in The Saturday Evening Post and grew into a recovery revolution for everybody from over-eaters and the over-sexed to gamblers and shopaholics.
More than 27 million copies of the so-called Big Book in more than 50 languages have been sold, but little was known about how the manual where none had ever existed was conceived. Did AA's co-founder Bill Wilson, a fallen New York stockbroker, really write much of it himself with the help of early adherents?
Turns out the group's bible was heavily vetted, as reflected in a working manuscript to be published Friday for the first time. Called "The Book that Started it All," the document is filled with crossouts, inserts and notes, presumably based on feedback sought from about 400 hand-picked outsiders who included doctors and psychiatrists.
Some of the edits made it into print, especially in early chapters for fragile readers. Many others were rejected as the still-anonymous personalities behind the notes fretted over how to handle God and religion, a Higher Power "bigger than ourselves" and the influence of the Oxford Group, a religious movement embraced by Wilson and his fellow founder, Ohio physician Bob Smith, but later considered a preachy hindrance in working with problem drinkers.
 

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