Kraaiende haan
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
Everything is resolved to two values, black and paper, which is the discipline a stamped cloth binding demands - one ink, no halftone, legible at arm's length. The rooster is left almost entirely unfilled while everything around it is solid, so the subject is defined by the negative space rather than drawn into it. The heavy hand-drawn border is doing a production job: it fixes the block's edge and stops the motif dissolving into the cloth. Loose speckling across the bird's body supplies the only texture on the sheet and keeps a flat silhouette from going dead.
Steal this when
Use this when a mark has to survive one-colour reproduction on a rough surface - stamping, cloth, letterpress - and fine detail will be lost. Reserve the bare paper for the subject, solidify everything around it, and draw the containing edge by hand so it belongs to the drawing rather than to the printer.