Illustration · A big office desk with a pad of blank stock certificates, a fountain pen and a typewriter, and an armchair behind it. Not drawn from a photograph.

New York and Newark · Fall 1938

Par value $25

Harper offered to publish the book. Hank P. talked Bill W. into publishing it themselves, with stock certificates from a stationery store.

“What made you think that we would buy stock in a book not yet written?”

The New York members, as Bill W. remembered them · Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957

Hank’s idea

In the early fall of 1938, the trustee Frank Amos sent Bill W. to Eugene Exman, religious editor at Harper & Brothers, with the two chapters Bill had written. Exman read them and asked if Bill could write a whole book in that style. Harper, he said, might advance him $1,500 in royalties.

Bill was elated, then uneasy. If the book became the fellowship’s main text, an outside publisher would own it. He would owe Harper the advance. And if publicity brought a flood of letters, there would be no money to answer them. The trustees were all for Harper. The meeting ended without a decision.

Then Hank P. got into it. A former Standard Oil executive, sober about two years, he had red hair and, Bill wrote, “at least one new idea a minute.” Forget the trustees, he said: form a company and sell shares to the members. To Bill’s amazement, Exman agreed that a society like theirs ought to publish its own literature.

Hank’s prospectus set shares at $25: a third to be sold for cash, two-thirds to Hank and Bill for their work, and the author’s royalty to the Foundation. He attached a chart of the profits on 100,000, 500,000 and a million books. He named the company Works Publishing, and when Bill objected that it wasn’t even incorporated, Hank turned up with a pad of blank stock certificates from a stationery store.

Not one share sold. Then an editor at the Reader’s Digest said he was almost sure the magazine would run a piece, and that night they started again, on the installment plan. Soon 200 shares were subscribed, $5,000 in all, and Charles B. Towns lent $2,500 more.

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The stock

Six hundred shares

A certificate Hank made himself, and a split that gave two-thirds of the company to the two men doing the work.

From Bill W.’s account in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957. The certificate is a reconstruction from his description.

Works Publishing, Inc.

par value $25.00

Henry P.blank, President

Reconstruction · The legend Bill remembered typed across the top of each blank certificate, and the signature at the bottom, with the surname left blank as Bill printed it. Lois W., remembering the same pad, added that Hank “certainly was not” president. Not a copy of a real certificate.

600 shares proposed

200 for cash$25 a share, or $5 a month for five months. Members, trustees, doctors and Bill’s old Wall Street friends subscribed them all: $5,000.
400 for Hank and BillFor their work, split equally. They couldn’t be issued until the cash subscribers had their money back.

Hank’s chart showed the profits on sales of 100,000, 500,000 and even a million books. By Lois W.’s account, they had worked out that a 400-page book selling for $3.50 could be printed for about 35 cents a copy. The first printing, when it came, was 4,650.

Their own book

Bill was sure of one thing: the fellowship ought to own and control its own literature. Selling shares to the drunks themselves was how he and Hank tried to make that happen. In 1940 the shares were bought back, and AA came to own its book.

For a closer look

Go deeper

The offer Bill turned down; who finally bought the shares; and who Hank P. was.

Harper’s offer

Bill told Exman the book would take nine or ten months. The $1,500 advance would come out of his royalties once the book was finished in 1939.

The trustees thought Harper was the answer. Authors, they pointed out, seldom publish their own books and get away with it. Lois W. remembered that most of the New York members liked the idea of publishing it themselves, and so did Dr. Bob, but the rest of the Akron group thought it “a dangerous undertaking.”

Exman himself sided with Bill and Hank, “quite contrary to his own interest,” Bill wrote. He stayed a friend, and in 1953 Harper took AA’s next book, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, to the bookstores.

Who bought

Nearly everybody was broke, so a share could be paid off at $5 a month for five months, and many could afford only one. The trustees pitched in. So did some members’ friends, a few of Bill’s old Wall Street cronies, and Dr. Silkworth and Dr. Harry Tiebout.

Hank went around prodding the subscribers for their installments. With Charles B. Towns’s loan of $2,500, the money paid for the office and for groceries for Hank, Ruth Hock, Lois and Bill until the book came out in April 1939.

By 1940 there were forty-nine cash subscribers.

Who Hank was

Henry P., always Hank, was the first alcoholic in the New York group to stay sober even a little while. He had been a protégé of Dr. Silkworth’s and a regular at Towns Hospital. Bill called him one of the most terrific power-drivers he ever met.

Lois W. remembered him as “a dynamic, redheaded salesman” who had been fired from an executive job with Standard Oil of New Jersey because of his drinking. Sober, he had a plan to organize gasoline dealers into a united buying front, called Honor Dealers, run from a small office in Newark with a secretary named Ruth Hock. That office is where Bill wrote the book.

His own story went into the first edition of the book and was dropped from later ones. His later years are told in Legacy.

Sources

Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Service: The Third Legacy.”
Lois Remembers. Al-Anon Family Groups, 1979. Chapter 9, “The Group Conscience” (Hank and Honor Dealers), and chapter 10, “The Big Book” (the decision to publish, the certificates and the costs).
“Hank Parkhurst”, Wikipedia. For his story in the first edition.