"Surely there will be a very special edition of Science and Health," a church member wrote the Publisher's Agent recently. "I have the 50th and the 75th. Now it is 100 years. Certainly Mrs. Eddy's book deserves the most beautiful edition of all in this centennial year."
"There is indeed a Century Edition of Science and Health," says Frances C. Carlson, Publisher's Agent. "And it's a beautiful book. In designing this edition, which marks 100 years since the book's first publication in 1875, we weren't seeking to create a special effect suitable only for an anniversary edition, but rather to provide a book in a new format that would be functional and bring something new to each reader.
"We knew that many lines in Science and Health had been expanded or compressed to accommodate the revisions Mrs. Eddy had made after the Concordance was published," Miss Carlson says. "We knew also that when typographers were resetting Science and Health, their natural tendency was to close up the lines which were spaced out, and to increase word spacing in those lines which were tight. We set sample pages using this normal word spacing, and letting the line lengths vary as the established line breaks demanded. Then we saw that the marginal headings could be placed at the right side of these varied line lengths, in the naturally increased margin area. This made them more visible, without dominating the text lines, or interfering with them.
