Behind the arras by Bliss Carman (1895) - poster
The pattern
This still is filed under Lettered cover hook.
Define
The cover is the hook, and the hook is lettering: a title treated as an image.
Mechanism
Type as bait. The words are drawn so they stop the hand before the contents are known.
Verdict
A journal, book, or issue must sell itself on a rack or a feed
Why it works
The design is built on figure-ground inversion. Hair, dress and background flowers are all the same two flat inks, so the eye has to resolve the face and the open book out of a single black mass, and that half-second of resolution is the attention tax the poster collects. Closed eyes plus an open book stage the act of reading itself rather than illustrating any scene from the poems, which lets one image stand for a whole volume. The blackletter top and bottom bands square the composition and make the ochre panel read as a window, borrowing the authority of a framed picture for a piece of commercial print.
Steal this when
Use this when the product is a mood or an experience rather than a feature set, and a literal depiction would shrink it. Also use the two-ink flat-shape approach when the piece must read from across a street on cheap stock.