A Medicine of the Sea is a series of bright little picture books about the ocean, science, and not wasting a thing. Each one takes a creature off the Mendocino coast (a crab, a sea urchin) and shows the medicine and useful materials hidden inside it. The stories rhyme and are built for reading aloud. The science is true. The idea behind all of them is simple: the ocean's everyday creatures turn out to be tiny doctors.
To help children, and the grown-ups reading to them, see the ocean's everyday creatures with new eyes. Most of us look at a crab or an urchin and think seafood. These books show what else it can be: a source of medicine and useful materials. And to pass along a simple idea worth growing up with: the sea gives us so much, and we should waste none of it. Every book turns a true piece of marine science into a story a small child can love, so wonder and respect for the ocean start early.
John E. Naulty Jr. grew up diving the Mendocino coast, free-diving for abalone and spearfishing and falling hard for life underwater. He still lives on that coast, where the kelp forests that once grew tall have thinned out badly. He works in marine-bioactive research, the chemistry of getting medicine and materials out of sea creatures, and he writes these books to share what the sea quietly gives us. Every fact in them comes from the published scientific literature, from the crab-shell powder that helps a cut stop bleeding to the urchin's ruby-red antioxidant.
There's a reason these stories keep circling back to kelp. I grew up diving this coast with my brother, spearfishing and free-diving for abalone, learning first-hand what a living kelp forest feels like. Since 2014, Northern California has lost more than 90% of its bull kelp. The abalone that fed on it have starved, and the fishery my generation grew up with has been closed since 2018. I don't want to be of the last generation to dive amongst the kelp forests. So this series carries a bigger hope than selling books: to raise a generation that loves the ocean, and to help bring back the kelp forests and the diving heritage that depends on them.
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A Medicine of the Sea is a one-person publishing project, and I want to be straightforward about how it's made.
I write the stories, design the characters, and research the science myself. The illustrations are created with AI image tools, which I art-direct page by page into a hand-painted "ink-and-wash" watercolor style, keeping Tom, Matt, and Captain Perk looking the same from book to book. I chose this path for an honest reason. As a solo author without an illustration budget, it's how these books get to exist at all. The alternative wasn't the same books drawn by a person. It was no books.
I have a lot of respect for illustrators and the craft, so I tell you plainly how the pictures are made, here and on the copyright page of every book. The images are generated on my own computer here on the coast, not in a giant data center, which keeps the footprint small for a small press. And as the series grows, I'd love to bring human illustrators into the work.
What's fully human is the heart of it: the story, the characters, and the science are mine.
Mendo-Sea-Know House of Publishing is an independent micro-press on the Mendocino coast. We publish picture books that find the medicine hiding in the ocean's everyday creatures, one little crab, one little urchin, one little story at a time.
For school and library orders, author visits, review copies, or anything else: [email protected].