The book is bound in blue cloth with the title stamped in silver foil. It is a dense seventy-two pages, sized to fit, if necessary, in a no. 10 envelope, and features a bound-in bookmark of blue ribbon.

We commissioned illustrator Stephen Noble for an engraved portrait of the doctor in front of the universe. Halley’s Comet, which was of particular interest to him, hangs over his right shoulder.

The preface is by Dr. Bronner’s son Ralph, who became the caretaker and apostle of his father’s spiritual vision, while his brother Jim ran the day-to-day operations of the soap company. It was Ralph who gathered and went through the doctor’s labels and recordings, giving formal shape to his life’s work. Ralph Bronner died shortly after this book went to press.

We designed the text to be straightforward and workmanlike. In a concession to close readers, it is composed in roman—Hoefler & Co.’s Chronicle (though we would likely have specified Butterick’s Century Supra had it been available)—rather than the industrial sans of the labels. Dr. Bronner’s writing was as eccentric typographically as it was in terms of language: long strings of all caps, exclamation marks, superscripts, subscripts, abrupt shifts into verse, and so on. It required a robust character set, but unsentimental color.

The running head is used in the nineteenth-century manner, summarizing the content of the two pages beneath. Though the text is not as dense as it is on the bottles, it is still fairly thick. In keeping with its creator’s wont to fill every available inch, we were sparing in our use of white space.