They Didn't Believe Me cover
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 cover is a two-block hierarchy with nothing in between: an enormous title and a decorative field, so it is readable in a rack at arm's length where a busier cover would fail. Printing the whole thing in one ink plus black keeps it cheap for a high-volume item while the sheer saturation of that blue does the work a second colour would have done. The show credit is the actual selling line - it converts an unfamiliar title into a known quantity by attaching it to a production the buyer has heard of - and it is placed at the bottom of the panel, read last, which is exactly where a reassurance belongs. Setting lyricist and composer at identical size on one baseline signals a professional Broadway product rather than a novelty, and the symmetrical ornament fills a panel that would otherwise need illustration the publisher did not have to commission.
Steal this when
Steal this when you are launching one item out of a body of work that is already known: put the item's own name at full size, give the parent property a single credit line low in the layout, and let ornament carry the middle rather than paying for bespoke art.