I remember reading about some of the important manuscript edits that were suggested to the Big Book, such as "God as we understood Him" and I can't help but wonder what the program was like before the Big Book, whether it actually would have survived as is, and what it would be like now without them. Here is but one site describing this: www.aacleve.org/big-book-manuscript-edits-vital/. I read this and wonder if Bill gets too much credit for a book I suspect would have flopped without them (showing the importance of a group conscience in AA even though I get the impression that Bill did in fact "govern" at times). AA is now suing to get one of the original manuscripts (multiliths) back: www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/06/07/alcoholics-anonymous-goes-to-court-and-its-members-are-livid.html. Bill left the manuscript to his non alcoholic wife who reports say that he cheated on for a considerable amount of time who passed it along to another making me wonder why the manuscript wasn't donated to AA in the first place; as created by group conscience, morally it already belonged to AA.  It seems that AA has frequentlyy lost in the legal arena, so why try: silkworth.net/charliebJr/spirituality_versus_legalism_in_alcoholics_anonymous.htm.

Know that the only reason that a copy of the original Big Book is available is that AA "negligected" to renew the copyright for the first and second editions, and yet AA, and apparently not Bill W, considers the manuscript so deeply personal that it has to sue to get it back.

All of this sounds like a group of alcoholics who out never be organized!  How does AA as an organization actually survive?