HelpThe Original Manuscript
This is an electronic reproduction of the 1938 Original Manuscript of Alcoholics Anonymous. This was the version of The Big Book distributed to friends and colleagues of AA's founders before the First Edition was printed. Text was taken directly from the copy owned by Clarence S. (Wrote the story: The Home Brewmeister in the modern Big Book).
The stories in the manuscript were the same as the First Edition stories (Except that "Lone Endeavor" appears only in the First Edition)
When we sat down to transcribe the manuscript (referring also to other copies where the original is blurry), we came across a good number of apparent mistakes. We are not interested in adding any changes or opinions about what it was "supposed" say, so we have left the text just as it originally appeared. Following the places where we found apparent grammatical or spelling errors we have added a ~ to assure the reader that it is an intentionally reproduced "typo".
The only time this is used in the modern text is for "whisky" on page 6 (appears here in paragraph 5:6). It was "whiskey" in the first printing of the first edition but got changed sometime later. The other 2 times whiskey is referred to in the first 164 pages it is spelled "whiskey".
About the paragraph numbers
Paragraph numbers refer to the page and paragraph locations in the 3rd Edition regular Big Book. Paragraph numbers start with the first full paragraph on a page.