Fred Marcellino, October 25, 1939 - July 12, 2001 Fred Marcellino was born October 25, 1939 in Brooklyn, New York. In 1960, he graduated from Cooper Union with a degree in painting and proceeded to Venice to study for a year. He specialized in creating art for album covers, but in 1975 switched to designing exclusively for book covers. Marcellino was contracted by such publishers as Random House, Simon and Schuster, Knopf and Houghton Mifflin. He produced over forty book covers in a ten year period and then stopped to produce his own books, children's stories which he illustrated himself. In 1990, Marcellino received a Caldecott Honor for his illustration of "Puss in Boots." In 1999, his… book "I, Crocodile," was one of the New York Times' Best Illustrated Children's Books. Fred Marcellino died on July 12, 2001 at the age of 61 from colon cancer.