Fred Marcellino (1939–2001), a painter, designer, and renowned creator of jacket art for adult books, fell in love with children’s book illustration when he created the pictures for A Rat’s Tale by Tor Seidler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). As he wrote, “Each picture is a link in a chain, and they all exist in counterpoint with the text. And although you want each picture to have impact, just like the jacket, the book illustration can also be much more subtle.”

He quickly proved a master of the genre. He produced Baroque-inspired art and a ground-breaking type-free jacket for his first full-color picture book, the Charles Perrault fairytale Puss in Boots (Farrar, Straus and Giroux.), which received a Caldecott Honor. He followed it with The Wainscott Weasel, another collaboration with Tor Seidler, and signature versions of beloved classics, including The Steadfast Tin Solder by Hans Christian Anderson, The Pelican Chorus and Other Nonsense by Edward Lear, and Ouch!: A Tale from Grimm by Natalie Babbitt. He also created black-and-white spot art for The Trumpet of the Swan, a middle-grade novel by E. B. White. (All HarperCollins.)

His last picture book, I, Crocodile (HarperCollins), the first that he wrote as well as illustrated, was named a New York Times Best Illustrated Book, a Publishers Weekly Best Book, and an ALA Notable Book. In 2002, The Norman Rockwell Museum honored him with “Dancing by the Light of the Moon: The Art of Fred Marcellino,” a comprehensive exhibit of more than 150 of his book illustrations.