In childhood's country, by Louise Chandler Moulton - 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 type is deliberately ordinary, plain book roman rather than a display face, so the whole voltage of the sheet sits in the image and the poster reads as an extension of the book's own title page. The colour pairing does the stopping: chrome yellow against cyan against black is not a natural palette and was not what the eye expected on a street in the 1890s. The child is given a drowsy, ambiguous adult expression rather than a sweet one, which unsettles the viewer just enough to hold them, and the black dress anchors the composition as a single flat mass that survives distance.
Steal this when
Reach for this when the product is quiet and literary and you want the visual, not the copy, to carry the whole interruption. Keep the typography plain and honest, spend everything on one figure and an unexpected colour pair, and let price and imprint sit flatly at the foot.