Reader after reader has written Hazelden with stories about how their copies of Twenty-Four Hours a Day-tattered pages stained with coffee or tears-became the anchor of their recovery.

"Twenty-Four Hours a Day generates by far the most inspirational letters of thanks to use compared to any other book we publish," says Nick Motu, vice president of Publishing and Educational Services at Hazelden. "There's tremendous affection for this book. People are tied to it emotionally because it's one of the first books they find solace from in the recovery process."

A daily tool in treatment
At Hazelden, Twenty-Four Hours a Day is an essential tool. Newcomers to treatment get a copy of the book, along with the recovery classics Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Thereafter, Twenty-Four Hours a Day gets daily use. In several treatment units, for example, residents meditate each morning on several of the books' entries.

While Twenty-Four Hours a Day is widely admired, people in recovery single out different aspects of the book as the source of its day-by-day power.

"More than anything, it's the way that the book is laid out that makes it so useful," says Sam Boatman, a counselor on the Shoemaker Unit in Center City. "For anybody, regardless of what level they are at in their recovery, one of the three parts of each reading-the thought for the day, meditation, or prayer-is going to have something significant for them every day."

Dave Schreck, another Hazelden counselor, points to the core messages in Twenty-Four Hours a Day. "We use it every day to help people remember the simple principles of the program: living one day at a time, letting go of the past, not beating yourself up over what you did yesterday, and adopting a positive outlook on the future."

Cecelia, a recovering person, emphasizes the value of the book for people without access to a community of recovering people. "When I first got clean, I didn't go to treatment but I did have a Twenty-Four Hours a Day book," she says. "So I would read that book from cover to cover while I went through the withdrawal process. It just really spoke to me. The book has this kind of universal voice that says we can get clean and that our lives are getting better. It's never outdated, never archaic."

Creating a genre
For a book with humble beginnings, Twenty-Four Hours a Day has a long résumé. Among people in recovery, the book largely defined the concept of bibliotherapy, or healing through reading. Its format created a publishing genre, the meditation book. The book's international appeal also led to Spanish, Swedish, French, German, Russian and Taiwanese editions. Readers in the Netherlands and Iceland have their versions as well.

Twenty-Four Hours a Day is often called "the little black book," a nickname that acknowledges its status in recovery literature next to the "Big Book"- Alcoholics Anonymous. In its English version, the Big Book has sold over 23 million copies and is currently available in 48 languages. The numbers for Twenty-Four Hours a Day are smaller-7.8 million copies sold in the United States and 1.5 million abroad. Yet sales of the book have held constant for decades and actually increased over the past couple of years.

Grounded in personal experience of recovery
The publishing history of Twenty-Four Hours a Day reads like a series of divinely inspired accidents. It begins with the book's author, Richmond Walker, whose efforts to get sober predate the founding of AA.

Walker was born in Brookline, Mass., in 1892. He graduated magna cum laude from Williams College with a Phi Beta Kappa key. After serving in World War I he settled in Boston, going into business with his brother. "We had a house on Beacon Hill, a servant, and we did a lot of entertaining," Walker said. "Although I went to the office every day, I was never much of a businessman-it did not really interest me."

What did interest Walker was drinking. He discovered alcohol at age 20 and eventually became addicted. By 1939, his habit had cost him his home, his summer cottage on Nantucket Island, and his marriage.

Eventually Walker discovered the Oxford Group. This non-denominational movement centered on a search for the spiritual roots of Christianity-"first-century Christianity," as some of its adherents put it. The Oxford Group attracted a number of recovering alcoholics who were attracted to the daily practice of the movement's Four Absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. Among those alcoholics were Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, cofounders of AA.

Walker himself found about a year-and-a-half of sobriety in his experience with the Oxford Group. After a relapse, he maintained 23 years of sobriety as an AA member until his death in 1965.

Variations on a theme
Walker attributed his recovery to his penchant for living in the present moment rather than dwelling on regrets about the past or worries about the future. "If we don't take that first drink today, we'll never take it, because it's always today," he wrote in the original foreword to Twenty-Four Hours a Day. By 1948, Walker had expanded this theme into 365 readings, one for each day of the year. One of the most popular passages is an entry for July 31, which includes these words:

Anyone can fight the battles of just one day. It is only when you and I add the battles of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives us mad. It is the remorse or bitterness for something that happened yesterday or the dread of what tomorrow may bring. Let us therefore do our best to live but one day at a time.

The March 5 Meditation for the Day emphasizes a related idea-the need for daily renewal:

Refilling with the spirit is something you need every day. For this refilling with the spirit, you need these times of quiet communion, away, alone, without noise, without activity. You need this dwelling apart, this shutting yourself away in the very secret place of your being, away alone with your Maker. From these times of communion you come forth with new power. This refilling is the best preparation for effective work. When you are spiritually filled, there is no work too hard for you.

Passing the book on
Word-of-mouth promotion fueled a brisk demand for Twenty-Four Hours a Day. Somehow Walker managed to print, package, and distribute about 18,000 copies of the book himself. Eventually, though, he tired of acting as a one-man publishing house. Walker approached AA World Services with the idea of passing the job over to them. AA declined. So in 1954 Walker approached Hazelden, then five years old, about taking over the book. Patrick Butler, Hazelden's president, had the foresight to accept. In May 1954, Hazelden published 5,000 copies of the book, marking the organization's entry into the world of publishing. Nearly all of the books sold within the year. Reprintings began and have continued to the present.

Butler's timing was fortuitous. Recovering alcoholics had the Big Book to read, but they were hungry for more. Twenty-Four Hours a Day helped to fill the gap.

Ernest Kurtz, author of Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, wrote that the little black book was even more widely used among AA members during the 1950s than the Big Book. Said an AA historian, "The chain of circumstances that led to Hazelden publishing the book is amazing-the fact that AA refused it and that the opportunity fell to Pat Butler. People in AA might see the hand of a Higher Power at work here." Sales figures aside, Butler himself witnessed an unexpected testimonial to the book's popularity. Damian McElrath, author of Hazelden: A Spiritual Odyssey, quotes Butler on the incident:

I did not realize the high esteem the little book has assumed in the minds of people until I went to a wake. In Catholic wakes, quite often you will see entwined in the hands of the deceased a rosary or a prayer book therein. In this particular case, I was startled to see the Twenty-Four Hours a Day book in his hands.

Perennial principles
In its simplicity, Twenty-Four Hours a Day achieves a marriage of form and content, medium and message. Small enough to fit into a pocket or purse and designed to be digested one page at a time, the book invites a slow and measured daily reading. Within the terse and highly structured format of a meditation book, Walker manages to put AA principles in the context of timeless truths. In fact, the book's epigraph comes from an ancient Sanskrit proverb, one that expresses an insight to be rediscovered in each generation, and by each recovering person:

For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today, well-lived,
Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Published in The Voice, Winter 2004