The Wartime Big Book: The Curious Case of the 7th & 8th Printings

In early 1945, Alcoholics Anonymous found itself facing an unusual problem.

The Fellowship was growing rapidly. More people were seeking help. More copies of Alcoholics Anonymous were needed. But the United States was still at war, paper was in short supply, and the federal government was restricting the amount of paper publishers could use.

For a book already famous for being unusually large, this presented a particular challenge.

The Big Book was going to have to get smaller.

The Big Book Meets a World War

By the closing years of World War II, shortages had affected nearly every part of American life, including the publishing industry. The U.S. War Production Board imposed restrictions intended to conserve paper and other materials needed for the war effort.

Alcoholics Anonymous was not exempt.

According to the Alcoholics Anonymous General Service Office Archives, Bobbie B., secretary of the Alcoholic Foundation—the predecessor of today’s General Service Board—contacted the War Production Board in Washington, D.C. several times seeking permission to continue producing the Big Book beyond A.A.’s wartime allotment of five tons of paper.

This was more than a publishing inconvenience.

A.A. was expanding quickly, and keeping the Big Book available meant keeping its message available to alcoholics who needed it—including men and women serving during the war.

The solution would eventually require changes to one of the most recognizable characteristics of the book itself: its size.

January 1945: The Mysterious Seventh Printing

The Seventh Printing of the First Edition appeared in January 1945.

Near the beginning of the book is an unusual page headed:

IMPORTANT NOTICE

It identifies the volume as a wartime printing and assures readers that its contents remain complete and unabridged. More significantly, the notice explains that the book had been “drastically reduced in size and weight” in order to comply with government paper-saving regulations.

There is only one problem.

The Seventh Printing wasn’t drastically smaller.

Physically, surviving Seventh Printings remain in essentially the larger format of the preceding First Edition Big Books.

The notice announces a change that the physical book does not fully reflect.

That contradiction has made the Seventh Printing one of the great curiosities of Big Book collecting.

So What Happened?

The simple answer is that we don’t know for certain.

Over the years, collectors have offered several explanations. It has frequently been described as a printing error, an aborted production run, or a transitional issue produced while Works Publishing and its printer were preparing to manufacture the smaller wartime book.

Some of those explanations may ultimately prove correct. But without definitive production records establishing exactly what happened, they should not be treated as settled history.

What we can document is that the Seventh Printing appeared in January 1945 carrying the wartime reduction notice while retaining the larger format.

And almost immediately afterward, the Big Book changed dramatically.

How Rare Is the Seventh Printing?

The Seventh Printing is also one of the most elusive of all sixteen First Edition Big Book printings.

For many years, collectors and A.A. historians have suggested that only a few hundred copies were produced, with estimates frequently falling somewhere around 300 to 500 copies.

That figure, however, deserves an important qualification.

No definitive production record confirming a 300–500-copy print run has been identified. Other historical and bibliographical sources have offered different numbers. The familiar few-hundred-copy figure is therefore better understood as a longstanding collector estimate, not an established production total.

What does not require an estimate is the book’s scarcity today.

Surviving Seventh Printings appear far less frequently than most other printings of the First Edition. For collectors attempting to assemble all sixteen First Edition printings, the Seventh can be one of the most difficult volumes to locate.

Its scarcity becomes even more interesting because of what happened next.

February 1945: The Smallest Big Book

In February 1945, Works Publishing issued the Eighth Printing.

This time, the transformation announced by the wartime notice was unmistakable.

The weight of the paper was reduced and the dimensions of the book were cut down. The generous margins associated with earlier Big Books were trimmed considerably.

The result was a noticeably smaller volume—and the smallest of all sixteen printings of the First Edition Big Book.

For perhaps the most literal moment in its publishing history, the Big Book wasn’t particularly big.

The change was not cosmetic. It was a practical response to wartime scarcity that allowed Alcoholics Anonymous to continue producing its central text while conserving a limited supply of paper.

A.A.’s own archival history credits these reductions in paper weight and trim size with helping keep the Big Book in production at a critical moment.

A.A. Was Getting Bigger While the Big Book Got Smaller

There is another side to this story that is easy to overlook when concentrating only on the physical books.

Alcoholics Anonymous itself was changing extraordinarily quickly.

When the original First Printing appeared in April 1939, the young Fellowship numbered only about 100 men and women.

By January 1945, the Seventh Printing announced:

“The Story of How More Than Fourteen Thousand Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism.”

Inside was a new section appropriately titled:

“NOW WE ARE FOURTEEN THOUSAND — JANUARY 1945.”

In less than six years, the small collection of alcoholics responsible for publishing the original Big Book had developed into a rapidly expanding national Fellowship.

That growth made access to the book increasingly important at precisely the moment wartime shortages made producing it increasingly difficult.

The Seventh and Eighth Printings therefore document two histories at once.

They record the material constraints of wartime America while simultaneously recording the remarkable expansion of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The Big Book Gets Big Again

The small wartime format did not last.

With the Ninth Printing in January 1946, the Big Book returned to a larger physical format.

The unusual Seventh and Eighth Printings were left behind as artifacts of a remarkably brief period—two consecutive printings produced only weeks apart during the final months of World War II, yet dramatically different in their physical appearance.

Today, placing a Seventh and Eighth Printing beside one another makes that history immediately visible.

One carries a notice announcing a dramatic wartime reduction while still retaining the earlier large format.

The next actually embodies that reduction.

Why the Wartime Big Books Matter

For collectors, the Seventh and Eighth Printings are much more than variations needed to complete a sixteen-printing First Edition set.

They are physical evidence of the circumstances under which early Alcoholics Anonymous operated.

The Seventh presents a historical mystery: a wartime notice announcing a transformation that the book itself does not fully exhibit.

The Eighth shows the transformation completed: lighter paper, smaller dimensions, reduced margins, and the most compact First Edition Big Book ever produced.

Neither needs an exaggerated story to make it interesting.

The books themselves tell the story.

They were produced while a relatively young Alcoholics Anonymous was attempting to carry its message during a world war, navigating government restrictions and shortages while thousands of new people were discovering the Fellowship.

And there is an appropriate historical irony in what survives from that moment:

At precisely the time the Big Book was forced to become smaller, Alcoholics Anonymous itself was becoming much larger.