Making of the Big Book

Page 4

      And then my promoter friend said, "But Mr. Paine, will you mention the new book in the piece?"

    "Yes," said Mr. Paine, "we will mention the book."

    Well, that was all we needed, we went back to the drunks and said, "now look, boys, there are positively millions in this – how can you miss? Harpers says its going to be a good book. We buy them for 35 cents from the printer, we sell them for $3.50 and the Reader’s Digest is going to give us a free ad in its’ piece and boys, those books will move out by the carload. How can you miss? And after all, we only need 4 or 5 thousand bucks."

    So we began to sell the shares of Works Publishing, not yet incorporated, par value $25 and at $5 per month to the poor people. Some people bought as little as one and one guy bought 10 shares. We sold a few shares to non-alcoholics and my promoter friend who was to get one-third interest was a very important man in this transaction because he went out and kept collecting the money from the drunks so that little Ruthie Hock and I could keep working on the book and Lois could have some groceries (even though she was still working in that department store).

    So, the preparation started and some more chapters were done and we went to A.A. meetings in New York with these chapters in the rough. It wasn’t like chicken-in-the-rough; the boys didn’t eat those chapters up at all. I suddenly discovered that I was in this terrific whirlpool of arguments. I was just the umpire - I finally had to stipulate:

    "Well boys, over here you got the Holly Rollers who say we need all the good old-fashioned stuff in the book, and over here you tell me we’ve got to have a psychological book, and that never cured anybody, and they didn’t do very much with us in the missions, so I guess you will have to leave me just to be the umpire. I’ll scribble out some roughs here and show them to you and let’s get the comments in."

    So we fought, bled and died our way through one chapter after another. We sent them out to Akron and they were peddled around and there were terrific hassles about what should go in this book and what should not.

    Meanwhile, we set drunks up to write their stories or we had newspaper people to write the stories for them to go in the back of the book. We had an idea that we’d have a text and all and then we’d have stories all about the drunks who were staying sober.

    Then came that night when we were up around Chapter 5. As you know I’d gone on about myself, which was natural after all. And then the little introductory chapter and we dealt with the agnostic and we described alcoholism, but, boy, we finally got to the point where we really had to say what the book was all about and how this deal works.

        s I told you this was a six-step program then. On this particular evening, I was lying in bed on Clinton Street wondering what the deuce this next chapter would be about. The idea came to me, well, we need a definite statement of concrete principles that these drunks can’t wiggle out of. Can’t be any wiggling out of this deal at all. And this six-step program had two big gaps in-between they’ll wiggle out of. Moreover if this book goes out to distant readers, they have to have got to have an absolutely explicit program by which to go.

    This was while I was thinking these thoughts, while my imaginary ulcer was paining me and while I was mad as hell at these drunks because the money was coming in too slow. Some had the stock and weren’t paying up. A couple of guys came in and they gave me a big argument and we yelled and shouted and I finally went down and laid on the bed with my ulcer and I said, "poor me."

    There was a pad of paper by the bed and I reached for that and said "you’ve got to break this program up into small pieces so they can’t wiggle out. So I started writing, trying to bust it up into little pieces. And when I got the pieces set down on that piece of yellow paper, I put numbers on them and was rather agreeably surprised when it came out to twelve.

    I said, "That’s a good significant figure in Christianity and mystic lore. "Then I noticed that instead of leaving the God idea to the last, I’d got it up front but I didn’t pay much attention to that, it looked pretty good.

    Well, the next meeting comes along; I’d gone on beyond the steps trying to amplify them in the rest of that chapter to the meeting and boy, pandemonium broke loose.

    "What do you mean by changing the program.. .what about this, what about that, this thing is overloaded with God. We don’t like this, you’ve got these guys on their knees….stand them up!"

    A lot of these drunks are scared to death of being Godly….let’s take God out of it entirely."

    Such were the arguments that we had. Out of that terrific hassle came the Twelve Steps. That argument caused the introduction of the phrase which has been a lifesaver to thousands....it was certainly none of my doing. I was on the pious side then, you see, still suffering from this big hot flash of mine.

    The idea of "God as you understand Him" came out of that perfectly ferocious argument and we put that in.

    Well, little by little things ground on, little by little the drunks put in money and we kept an office open in Newark, which was the office of a defunct business where I tried to establish my friend.

    The money ran lo     at times and Ruthie Hock worked for no pay. We gave her plenty of stock in the Works Publishing of course. All you had to do is tear it off the pay, par 25 have a week’s salary, dear.

    So, we got around to about January 1939. Somebody said "hadn’t we better test this thing out; hadn’t we better make a pre-publication copy, a multilith or mimeographed copy of this text and a few of the personal stories that had come in - try it out on the preacher, on the doctor, the Catholic Committee on Publications, psychiatrists, policemen, fishwives, housewives, drunks, everybody. Just to see if we’ve got anything that goes against the grain anyplace and also to find out if we can’t get some better ideas here?"

    So at considerable expense, we got this pre-publication copy made; we peddled it around and comments came back, some of them very helpful. It went, among other places, to the Catholic Committee on Publications in New York and at that time we had only one Catholic member to take it there and he had just gotten out of the asylum and hadn’t had anything to do with preparing the book.

    The book passed inspection and the stories came in. Somehow we got them edited, somehow we got the galleys together. We got up to the printing time.

    Meanwhile, the drunks had been kind of slow on those subscription payments and a little further on I was able to go up to Charlie Towns where old Doc Silkworth held forth. Charlie believed in us so we put the slug on to Charlie for $2,500 bucks.

    Charlie didn’t want any stocks, he wanted a promissory note on the book not yet written. So, we got the $2,500 from Charlie routed around through the Alcoholic Foundation so that it could be tax exempt. Also, we had blown $6,000 in these 9 months in supporting the 3 of us in an office and the till was getting low.

    We still had to get this book printed. So, we go up to Cornwall Press, which is the largest printer in the world, where we’d made previous inquiries and we asked about printing and they said they’d be glad to do it and how many books would we like? We said that was hard to estimate. Of course our membership is very small at the present time and we wouldn’t sell many to the membership but after all, the Readers Digest is going to print a plug about it to its’ 2 million readers. This book should go out in carloads when it’s printed.

    The printer was none other than dear old Mr. Blackwell, one of our Christian friends and Mr. Blackwell said "How much of a down payment are you going to make? How many books would you like printed?"

    "Well," we said "we’ll be conservative, let’s print 5,000 just to start with."

    Mr. Blackwell asked us what we were going to use for money. We said that we wouldn’t need much; just a few hundred dollars on account would be all right. I told you, after all, we’re traveling in very good company, friends of Mr. Rockefeller and all that.

    So, Blackwell started printing the 5,000 books; the plates were made and the galleys were read. Gee, all of a sudden we thought of the Reader’s Digest, so we go up to there, walk in on Mr. Kenneth Paine and say "We’re all ready to shoot."