The courant. 1896 Easter number - 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 masthead is set in plain newspaper blackletter and then everything below it switches to fine-art colour lithography, so the sheet announces both that it is the paper you already buy and that this week it is something else. The daffodil border is the low-cost device that carries the whole piece: it converts the picture into a framed print, which is the visual cue that tells a household to keep it. The edition name is held back to a small cartouche at the foot rather than given headline size, because the picture already says Easter and repeating it larger would turn a keepsake back into a newspaper. Two flowers are doing separate jobs - daffodil for the season, lily for the religious subject - which lets one image serve both a secular and a devotional reading.
Steal this when
Use this when a routine, disposable publication runs a special edition and you want the audience to keep it rather than read and bin it - hold the masthead plain, frame the artwork like a print, and shrink the edition label. It is also the model for a syndicated cover that has to work across many local titles.