# Is "Alcoholics Anonymous (the 'Big Book')" by [Bill Wilson et al.] a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous (the 'Big Book') by [Bill Wilson et al.] (Works Publishing Company, 1939) is identified by: First printing, April 1939, Works Publishing Company, New York (some sources give the imprint as Works Publishing, Inc.), printed by Cornwall Press. US only.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First printing, April 1939, Works Publishing Company, New York (some sources give the imprint as Works Publishing, Inc.), printed by Cornwall Press
- Every first printing is bound in red cloth with gilt stamping to the front board and spine; the second printing
- appears mostly in two shades of blue cloth with a small number in leftover red, and on the blue copies the gilt 'Alcoholics Anonymous' is dropped from the front board and retained only on the spine
- The sheets are printed on the thickest, cheapest bulking stock the printer had, with wide margins, which is why the volume is unusually thick and how it earned the 'Big Book' nickname; later printings use thinner paper and a visibly slimmer text block
- Two textual points are diagnostic
- First, the personal story 'Lone Endeavor' by Pat C. of Los Angeles (ghost-written by Ruth Hock) stands at p
- Publisher imprint reads Works Publishing Company

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | [Bill Wilson et al.] |
| Publisher | Works Publishing Company |
| Year | 1939 |
| True first | US edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | First printing, April 1939, Works Publishing Company, New York (some sources give the imprint as Works Publishing, Inc.), printed by… |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
First printing, April 1939, Works Publishing Company, New York (some sources give the imprint as Works Publishing, Inc.), printed by Cornwall Press. Every first printing is bound in red cloth with gilt stamping to the front board and spine; the second printing (1941) appears mostly in two shades of blue cloth with a small number in leftover red, and on the blue copies the gilt 'Alcoholics Anonymous' is dropped from the front board and retained only on the spine. The sheets are printed on the thickest, cheapest bulking stock the printer had, with wide margins, which is why the volume is unusually thick and how it earned the 'Big Book' nickname; later printings use thinner paper and a visibly slimmer text block. Two textual points are diagnostic. First, the personal story 'Lone Endeavor' by Pat C. of Los Angeles (ghost-written by Ruth Hock) stands at p. 391 in the first printing only and was dropped from the second printing, replaced by the 'Now We Are Two Thousand' membership page. Second, the first printing carries the well-known typographical error at p. 234, where two lines near the foot of the page are set twice. The Foreword at p. xiii opens with the fellowship describing itself as 'more than one hundred men and women'; A.A.'s own reprint of that Foreword is captioned as the text 'as it appeared in the first printing of the first edition in 1939.' The jacket is Ray Campbell's red, yellow, black and white design with the title in large white script across the top — the 'circus jacket' — and is priced at the flap; survival in jacket is very low, reported in the low hundreds at most. Sources conflict on the size of the first printing: both 4,650 and 4,730 copies are reported, so no figure is asserted here.

## Is this the true first?
US only. Works Publishing Company, New York, April 1939 is the true first; there is no competing UK or original-language edition and the text was written in English. Imprint trap: the book is now published by A.A. World Services, and any copy bearing that imprint is a later edition regardless of a 1939 copyright line.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club edition is documented. The dominant trap is the first edition's own later printings — sixteen printings ran from 1939 until the second edition of 1955 — which dealers routinely list as 'first edition' and which must be separated by printing state (red versus blue cloth, presence or absence of 'Lone Endeavor', the p. 234 error, paper bulk, front-board stamping). Beyond that, modern facsimiles and reset reprints of the 1939 text (Dover's 'The Original 1939 Edition' and similar) are new books, not 1939 sheets.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Alcoholics Anonymous (the 'Big Book')* by [Bill Wilson et al.] a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/alcoholics-anonymous-the-big-book
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.