Not easy to be a guy who writes travel guidebooks, but would prefer to stay home reading. How do you depict the thought? Fred always strove to “...reflect the book’s feeling. If a book is good, images just come forth. I think there’s a real correlation between the quality of a book and the quality of the cover I produce.” The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985 and the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction in 1986. It was also adapted into a 1988 award-winning film starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, and Geena Davis, for which Davis won an Academy Award.

What do James Dean, Mark Spitz, Ezra Pound, John Dillinger, and Colonel Sanders have in common? Indiana, it seems. For this collection of short monologues, Fred fashioned a Monty Python-esque montage. The shadows hold the elements together.

What can you say about August? Well, it’s hot, lots of people go to the beach, sunburn... and, aha! All the shrinks go away!

This is the first edition hardcover jacket for a widely reprinted collection of short stories.. Frustrated, lonely and divorced from their youthful expectations, Tobias Wolff's disaffected heroes drift through the present by telling assorted stories and lies.

The heroine works as a writer for a tabloid that sticks to unprovable stories, legends and lies. Fred’s jacket for this first edition combines the title’s two unlikely words without belaboring either one, reflecting the main character’s confusing career, and life.

One of our all-time favorites. Fred won the 1980 American Book Award for Jacket Design for Birdy, receiving a Louise Nevelson Sculpture prize. Birdy won the U.S. National Book Award in category First Novel and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1980. In 1984, Birdy was adapted as a film of the same name, directed by Alan Parker and starring Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage.

“So the critical moment occurred when I came up with the image of two cities, the city of privilege and the poorer city, the real city, and an image of that city reflected.” – Fred Marcellino, “Covering Tom Wolfe,” How Magazine, September/October 1988. Bonfire of the Vanities won the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction in 1988. In 1990, it was adapted into a film directed by Brian De Palma and starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Kim Cattrall.

In broad strokes, Fred manages to summarize the notion of “art,” without depicting any. Except, of course, his own beautifully rendered illustration.

The pen, the sky, the road. Anyone familiar with Fred’s book jackets will recognize all three elements as staples in his visual vocabulary. Here, they meet for “The Compromise,” the tale of the massive dissembling required of writers working within the USSR.

It's clear how much Fred admired Magritte in this evocative illustration for the book's first edition jacket. Set in a lunatic asylum and in a boys' public school in Wales, this riddle of a tale is told by a hypersensitive, unreliable narrator. Even the asylum might be imaginary.

This is the second book by William Wharton (his first, Birdy, was also designed by Fred), about a painter's dying father.

The undisputed Dean of American Storytelling veered from science fiction into mystery for this tale of mayhem set in Venice, California in the 1950s. Fred’s first edition jacket hints at bizarre events, including puzzling, and sometimes fatal, “accidents.”

For the jacket of this book’s first edition, Fred found an image that perfectly reflected the title, as well as the story’s mood and content. He insisted upon reading every manuscript before embarking on its cover, and wished they were all as enjoyable as this one.

The heroine of this novel has a special gift: she can observe the dreams of others. For the first edition of this haunting psychological thriller, Fred painted a sleeper as seen from above, with virtuosic treatment of the bedsheets’ folds.

Coming up with jacket imagery for books dealing with the Holocaust was always a special challenge. Avoiding the trite, grotesque, or maudlin could be a delicate exercise. Here Fred seems to have struck exactly the right tone.

Writers are said to have been described by Joseph Stalin as “engineers of human souls.” In this jacket for a comic novel by a Czech emigré, Fred presented the book’s title in an unexpected but entirely appropriate way.

This book is a masterpiece of cynical and nasty slapstick humor involving the Bullards and the Beelers, two families at war, from an American small town in the 1930s. Note the manner in which the pie’s juicy contents slithers down onto the type panel.

Fred was always in search of the unexpected visual metaphor, as you can see in this jacket illustration. The book’s main character, who’s been for years carting around an old violin (which he can’t play), loses his sanity at the story’s very beginning.

The heroine of this novel moves to sunny California. She finds love and wealth, but the Great Threat looms. How do you visually marry two of this novel’s main theme’s, celebration and nuclear holocaust? Fred found a way.

This paperback reissue of "Doctor Slaughter," (1984), retitled "Half Moon Street," was released in the lead-up to the release of the film adaptation starring Sigourney Weaver and Michael Caine. It presents two short novels on the theme of a double life. Although they differ in scene and character, both are full of a kind of eerie menace. Fred found an interesting way to visualize the premise.

This was ranked the #1 book jacket design of the last 25 years in Entertainment Weekly's “25 New Classic Covers.” Nan Talese, the book’s editor, reports that, upon seeing the sketch for the first time, Margaret Atwood gasped, “He read the book!”

A road trip, a stepmother and her new daughter getting acquainted. Another one of those tests of Fred’s mantra: “Never Illustrate the Title.” Well, there is a heart in there, but it just wanders in ever-so subtly. Pure Marcellino.

Again, here’s the “big book look,” with the author’s name greatly overpowering the title, for this first edition. The novel is an update of Louisa May Alcott’s classic, but takes place in Hollywood. Fred managed to marry the two elements with his clever bookmark.

Fred was honored to provide jackets for the first editions of four Milan Kundera novels: “The Joke,” “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” and “Immortality.” For this one, he created a masterful trompe l’oeil painting.

“The Joke” relates the serious consequences of a frivolous message that a university student sends his girlfriend by postcard. Fred loved nailing any thought in pictures. As is the case with any joke, there’s no need for further elaboration here.

This captivating book of essays, mostly on the author’s observations in cities around the world, has become a classic. Fred’s meandering road suggests that unexpected revelations will be found over every hill, and at every twist and turn, by the observant chronicler.

The hero may or may not be Ovid. The action takes place in ancient and modern times. There’s politics, literature, ecological disaster.... well, it couldn’t have been easy to synthesize. But, Fred certainly managed to make the jacket a beauty.

This novel is about a poet who, facing a fatal illness, decides to catalogue her life by packing away her journal entries in a series of boxes. For this first edition’s cover, Fred took an unusual step, for him. He set up these props in his office and painted them from life.

Fred fought hard to get the publisher to eliminate the italic repetition of the title, “The MacGuffin.” After all, the whole point of a MacGuffin is neglecting to notice what’s in plain sight. He wanted the reader to find the name of the book! Alas, the marketers won.

For over two decades, when publishers needed “serious fiction” jackets for books they anticipated might be big sellers, they often turned to Fred. The imagery and approach of this retro pastiche were considered highly ground-breaking for the time.

Once again, Fred pays homage to Magritte, with a little de Chirico thrown in, for this first edition jacket. Momo is an orphan who lives under the stage of an old Italian amphitheater, happily, until the arrival of the “gray men” whose mission is to steal time from the town’s good citizens.

Here is Barthelme’s debut collection of short stories confronting the contemporary American landscape. Fred used totally minimal imagery here, punctuated only by those telltale handrails to inform us of what we’re looking at. Very reminiscent of David Hockney.

The title essay in this collection describes the author’s upbringing at an Army base/arsenal in Ohio. Fred’s visual summary presents a toy soldier stealthily taking aim at a clover flower. The very rough lettering style was a radical, but entirely apt, departure for him.

Fred achieved an astonishing sense of scale and dimension for this novel’s jacket by using simple elements: two newspapers coming together with graduated tone, and type in bands of color. Look at the changing shapes as the shadows descend down the page.

Fred’s ultimate career fantasy: Lincoln Center commissions him to do the sets for a new Met production of an old Italian opera. He had done stage design for various plays in his youth, so knew well what a “slow fade” looked like from behind the scenes.

The “big book look,” so prevalent in book jacket design, dictated that a famous author’s name be presented in huge type. Fred found a way to conform, without sacrificing elegance. And found an interesting way to visualize an author’s earliest struggles.

One reviewer said this book is “...a loving, personal affirmation of Judaism, written with words and with silence, capturing the essence of Hasidism through tales, legends, parables, sayings, and deeply personal reflections.” And it's another of Fred’s eloquent first edition jackets.

Publishers frequently asked Fred to create jackets for works of “serious fiction,” like this novel by a new author. In this book, a patient is trying to find his way, “sounding the territory,” from within a mental institution. Once again, Fred found just the right visual metaphor.

Fred’s first edition cover for this acclaimed novel presents a charmingly innocent visualization of the book’s title. This is a growing-up tale set in the late 1930s, it’s hero gradually becoming aware of the Depression, developments in Europe, prejudice, sex, death and adultery.

“My tendency is to work all over the place, to do everything at once,” Fred told an interviewer. His collagist-instincts helped to visually capture the complexity of this author’s first novel about the social intersections within a fictionalized St. Louis.

You may recognize this cover, but there was a previous edition. One of the few times Fred agreed to the publisher’s desire for re-worked art. And one of the only times he conceded his second solution was better than his first.

As Steven Heller has written, Fred was a “master of sky.” Here, a bit of it appears framed by the Berlin Wall, the subject of this book, infusing both sky and wall with subtle eloquence. A later edition depicts, guess what? Yep, a man jumping off a wall.

For the first edition of this phantasmagorical novel, Fred broke one of his own rules: “I avoid simply depicting a specific scene....” Well, this image is taken from the text, however it depicted an analysand’s dream-life, thus evidently seemed within his bounds.

This image of Pegasus over a mythical and very cold New York City encapsulated the author’s millennial fantasy. Fred used a combination of aerial photography and skillful airbrushing to achieve an evocative and memorable effect.

On the rare occasions where it was possible, Fred liked to incorporate a book’s title within an image, as is the case here. This novel for young readers was about a 13-year-old boy who goes to live with his grandfather in Florida.

“Think of Medea, for instance. Even killing seemed better than not living your own life," opines Claire, a classicist and professor of Greek tragedies. Fred’s first edition jacket obliquely suggests neurosis, with the ominous presence of a man’s shadow.

This is a complex, layered, novel about three families in the Hudson Valley. Fred loved to poke holes in reality and did so on many occasions. And he could never resist a sky. Note the shadows cast by the title, another persistent element in his visual vocabulary.