The dust jacket of the “Circus Cover Edition” of the formally titled book “Alcoholics Anonymous” is a very bright red and yellow, centered with a bright red dot on top of an equally bright yellow paper background with a series of yellow and black, white and red stripes. The book itself is enclosed in a very bright red heavy cardboard binding. It’s printed on “the same bulky paper” used in 1939 when published by the Works Publishing Company formed by Bill and Dr. Bob. The cover notes in an apologetic way that the book can be ordered for “free examination” for $3.50 but says the buyer should include “a few extra cents [so that if he or she is] not satisfied the book will be helpful, the money including postage will be refunded.” At 2 inches thick and at a weight of 2.20 pounds, its nickname rightly became “The Big Book”. Thirty million copies of that Big Book have been sold and the Library of Congress has labeled it as one of 88 books which “shaped America.”

The title page of the Circus Cover Edition told us what this large book is all about:

       “The Story of How More than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism”

Just a cute story with a happy ending? Certainly, but what else does all this mean to me? Well, it sure tells the story about a bunch of recovering drunks who believed they had found a way out of the darkness of their alcoholism and maybe for the first time in their lives had found the ability to hold a job, to be happily married, and enjoy relationships with their kids.

For me, to put it in the simplest of ideas, it’s one of those “reminder-books” —one which tells me a lot and demands constant referral and use, not unlike the Bible. In AA’s Big Book, we read and study the stories written by those early recovery pioneers, stories we review at meetings, looking for similarity to our own lives, and how their words in 1939 might guide us as we walk their paths today.

Back when the book was published, AA, its very self, was stymied by society’s stigma on alcoholics. But these recovering alcoholics knew this disease was a far greater illness of society than exhibited by those found on South State or Madison in Chicago or on that “skid row” street in your hometown.  This bright red and yellow Big Book was the start of ridding society of the curse of stigma, and today, “stigma” is seen as nonsensical.

But another important question: what does the Circus Book Edition ask of me? Surely, it’ a tool for use at meetings to identify topics for discussion of how we can work the Steps for ourselves in our own program. Just as importantly, it shows the way for us to live life in a way which guides us to travel the road to the next right thing, not only in the Program but in the way we live life itself. Isn’t this what Christ and the New Testament writings of the Disciples, Peter and Paul and the others called us to undertake? Is not this Big Book, this Circus Book, similar in its callings?

Never had an organized reasonable path been suggested as a way out of our drunken dungeons. The Big Book was a frank discussion of that path, its wondering, the dangers we encounter.

How Bill and Dr. Bob picked the Circus Book’s cover escapes me ... it appears at first glance to be a bright colorful and heavy children’s book. Maybe that was their intention—to carry the message that they’d found that the Program itself outlines—a simple program for complicated people who were acting like children.

So does the “cuteness” of the “Circus Book” merely cause a chuckle, you bet it does—but then it says to me,

“Get out of your chair and get to that meeting at Noon, offer a comment or two which helped you in your own walk, listen to others and learn from them, and always speak to a newbie and walk this path of recovery with them, just as was first spelled out so well in the “Circus Book” of 1939."

JRA, ST X Noon, Cincinnati