Sarah Edmands Martin

DESIGNER

Associate Professor
University of Notre Dame

Designer, artist, and scholar working at the intersection of visual communication design, critical fabulation, and media aesthetics. 


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The Song of the Sea Demon

Book making, letterpress, illustration, popup design, book design2014
A handmade letterpress pop-up book of dark fairytales written with and for children.    





Concept


This handmade, letterpressed edition of dark folktale was written, illustrated, and designed as an experimental narrative that challenges young readers through interactive and multi-sensory engagement. The Song of the Sea Demon (or the Tale of the Dread Dogfish) (or the Killing Machine) incorporates original storytelling alongside unconventional bookmaking elements: pop-ups, edible pages, and puzzles, thereby expanding the boundaries of traditional storytelling. Drawing inspiration from the spontaneous and self-generated narratives that children create for themselves———reminiscent of oral schoolyard tales———the project directly sources its imaginative framework from its intended audience. By collecting, curating, and reinterpreting these child-authored narratives, the work seeks to synthesize a new form of folktale, one that reflects the dynamic and evolving nature of storytelling in participatory and tactile ways.


letterpress printing
book making
imposition
book design
illustration
community engagement
pop-up design
puzzle design
hard cover binding
edible paper


exhibited at AAHD Gallery (2014)











The Song of the Sea Demon (or the Tale of the Dread Dogfish) (or the Killing Machine) is both a darkly imaginative folktale and a critical design object that interrogates the conventions of children’s literature through form, tactility, and narrative structure. The cover is richly bound in red linen and stamped in gold foil, which draws on the visual lexicon of Victorian-era naturalist volumes and Gothic storybooks. The design plays with the expectation of moral clarity and whimsical innocence in the illustrated book genre, only to subvert it through surreal illustration, narrative rupture, and experimental interaction.








At the core of the work is a profound commitment to material storytelling. The letterpress printing, die-cuts, modular pages, popups, french folds, and edible pages invite the reader to engage not just with plot, but with the book as an object of discovery. This haptic interplay challenges the reader to reconsider the act of reading as one of embodied participation.


The narrative itself is nonlinear, fragmentary, and openly strange. Told from the perspective of a young protagonist navigating a mythic seascape, the story is populated with dreamlike figures: a pirate, a naturalist, a monstrous fish-machine. The illustrations evoke the naïveté of a child's drawing, yet are meticulously rendered in gouache-like textures and layered ink washes, creating a tension between innocence and sophistication. This stylistic contradiction simulates the imagined worlds children build which sometimes brush up against dark themes.









“I think if you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, no knowledge of, how to cope with dark things when they show up.”


Neil Gaiman The Guardian  
“Neil Gaiman: ‘I’m Not Scary. I’m Nice.’” 
Interview by Michelle Pauli; 2013.
Read more from The Guardian here.  















Importantly, the book takes its inspiration from what might be termed “children’s counterlore,” those shadowy, unregulated kids’ stories exchanged in playgrounds and whispered beneath blankets. Rather than impose an external folkloric template, the book has sourced content directly from child storytellers, collecting tales and tropes that resist coherence or closure. These fragments are then synthesized into a meta-folktale that plays with genre while remaining grounded in its oral and imaginative origins. The resulting narrative is more incantation than storybook, more ritual than lesson.











2014  /  THE SONG OF THE SEA DEMON  /   A movable page whose position in the book changes the meaning of the narrative.


What distinguishes this work within the field of experimental publishing is not only its layered storytelling but its interrogation of authorship and reader agency. By incorporating edible pages, secret compartments, and coded puzzles, the book destabilizes the passive reader model. Instead, it repositions the child not as recipient, but as decoder and co-conspirator. Each act of consumption—literal or interpretive—becomes a performative gesture, reinforcing the idea that stories are not told to children, but made with them.

Spatially, the book operates almost architecturally. Scenes unfold with theatrical pacing; bridges and boats pop from the gutter with dimensionality; waves curve across spreads like stage sets. The designer engages the book as a kind of paper-built installation, choreographing the reader’s eye and hand in tandem. This kinesthetic rhythm resists the sleek efficiency of digital narratives, inviting slowness, pause, and return—a design ethic that affirms analog media’s enduring capacity to provoke wonder.












“The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.”


Jack Zipes  When Dreams Came True:
Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition 
pg. 2; 2007
Read more from Jack Zipes here.

















The typographic treatment further advances the book’s conceptual frame. A deliberately restrained serif typeface is used throughout, evoking early 20th-century marine logs or missionary field journals. The restraint is strategic—it allows the visuals and interactivity to dominate while grounding the experience in a historical visual rhetoric. Occasional italics and enlarged capitals gesture toward illuminated manuscripts, while the consistent left-alignment ensures legibility amid the book’s structural complexities. Typography, here, is not decorative but infrastructural, acting as an interpretive compass.








From a critical design standpoint, The Song of the Sea Demon can be read as a provocation against the commodified, algorithmically safe children’s book industry. It dares to be grotesque, ambiguous, and formally unruly. It does not fear confusion or misreading. Rather, it trusts that meaning emerges not through didactic clarity, but through layered encounter—between story and structure, reader and page, fantasy and critique. In doing so, it reinvigorates the folktale not as moral lesson, but as fieldwork in fear, imagination, and transformation.








2014  /  WORKING WITH GROUPS OF YOUNG READERS AND WRITERS AT PUBLIC, PRIVATE, AND MONTESSORI SCHOOLS IN NORTHERN INDIANA TO CO-AUTHOR THE NARRATIVE;
Image prompts become narrative springboards for children’s own dark fairytales.








“The role of the storyteller is to awaken the storyteller in others.”


Jack Zipes

In total, this work stands as a profound meditation on narrative form, childhood invention, and the politics of storytelling. It is a book to be touched, unfolded, and read through action. It belongs as much in the artist’s studio and the design archive as in the hands of a child. It asks what stories might emerge when we loosen our grip on narrative control—and what new forms of design might arise when we treat the book not just as a vessel for content, but as an experiential world unto itself.