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Article Index
The Books and Materials Early A.A.s Read
Books about the Bible
The Sermon on the Mount
William James and Carl Jung
Materials about Finding God
All Pages

Early AAs were readers. The Bible was the written word of God. The daily devotionals were written guides. Oxford Group people wrote. Sam Shoemaker wrote. Anne Smith wrote. And there were a great many books available for reading. Dr. Bob was an avid reader, and so was his colleague Henrietta Seiberling. Every pioneer A.A. meeting had tables set out in T. Henry's house where literature was available. Dr. Bob recommended and circulated many books. He kept a journal which recorded the books loaned, and he quizzed the alcoholics on the Bible and on the written materials they had borrowed from him. Whatever their proclivity for reading, early AAs all attested to the presence of the Bible and The Upper Room. They mentioned The Runner's Bible. They mentioned E. Stanley Jones books. They mentioned Henry Drummond's The Greatest Thing in the World. They mentioned My Utmost for His Highest. They mentioned James Allen's As a Man Thinketh. They mentioned the popular Glenn Clark books, Emmet Fox books, and Harry Emerson Fosdick books. There were religious books, and almost every one elaborated on some aspect of ideas AAs were borrowing from the Bible and the Oxford Group for their basic principles.

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There was plenty of material on the Bible, prayer, healing, divine guidance, the Sermon on the Mount, 1 Corinthians 13, and the Book of James. There were Oxford Group/Shoemaker materials on finding God, changing lives, conversion, the guidance of God, fellowship, witness, and the teachings of Jesus. There has, perhaps, never been a fellowship with such diversity of subject matter at the immediate beck and call of its participants. Nor with such encouragement of its study by the "leadership."

Dr. Bob's Library

Dr. Bob and everyone that knew him well in the early A.A. days spoke of the immense amount of reading he did. He read the Bible through three times and studied it daily. As he put it:

I read everything I could find, and talked to everyone who I thought knew anything about it (DR. BOB, p. 56).

[Of the Oxford Group books and the Bible]... I had done an immense amount of reading they had recommended. I had refreshed my memory of the Good Book, and I had had excellent training in that as a youngster (The Co-Founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 11-12).

[To his son, "Smitty"] Well, I should know something, I've read for at least an hour every night of my adult life—drunk or sober (RHS, pp. 37-38).

DR. BOB and the Good Oldtimers reported:

For the next two and a half years [After January, 1933], Bob attended Oxford Group meetings regularly and gave much time and study to its philosophy... He read the Scriptures, studied the lives of the saints, and did what he could to soak up the spiritual and religious philosophies of the ages (p. 56).

Dr. Bob's daughter told the author that her father frequently stayed up late into the night studying the Bible (Dr. Bob's Library, p. 13).

With the foregoing comments as a start, the author was privileged to see the huge number of books that Dr. Bob had assembled, read, studied, and circulated. The author saw them in the home of Dr. Bob's daughter, Sue Smith Windows, in Akron; and he saw them in the home of Dr. Bob's son, Robert Smith, in Nocona, Texas. Many of the books had Dr. Bob's name and address in them with the notation "Please return." Dr. Bob's Library lists the materials in detail. But it is important to cover here the subject matter to show how much light it was able to shed on the ideas A.A. pioneers were studying and borrowing.

The Bible

This aspect of Dr. Bob's reading was considered so important that his Bible was donated to the King School Group (A.A. Number One), and it is taken to the podium at the beginning of each meeting, to this very day—a ceremony the author personally witnessed in the company of Dr. Bob's daughter Sue.

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