BOOK REVIEW
SOME FACTS ABOUT THE BIG BOOK
THE A.A. GRAPEVINE
July 1955
The new edition has 612 pages, as against 400 pages in the old. In terms of cost it is the best non-fiction buy in the country. No other commercial publisher in America could match the book, in size and format alone, at its retail price.
The first edition runs to 100,000 words, the edition just off the press is 168,869.
The old edition contained 29 stories, about 1,800 words each, the new edition has 37 — 24 of them brand new — and all of them running to twice the length (or about 3,300 words) of the earlier work. The new stories are more detailed and more explicit, more revealing, and of more useful contrast and variety.
The geographical spread, in the new book, is far greater: 15 cities, 10 states, two foreign countries.
The vocational range is immense: buyer, industrial executive, surgeon, banker, writer, educator, soldier, insurance agent, advertising executive, furniture dealer, stock farmer, beautician, charwoman, truck driver, insurance investigator, salesman, real estate agent, promoter, accountant, sculptor, journalist, upholsterer, organizational executive, patent expert, lawyer, doctor, and housewife. The most numerous in this list is the housewife — with six stories.
There are 110,000 words of absolutely new material, yet the practical, therapeutical, and expository first 175 pages of the original work are here intact. These pages have already gone into the American legend as the “greatest redemptive force of the twentieth century.” And these pages will remain there, through the full history of man’s pursuit of maturity.