Three gringos in Central America and Venezuela by Richard Harding Davis (1896) - 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
Splitting the sheet into a framed image above and a type block below is the book-poster convention, and it lets the picture sell mood while the type does the naming. The red initial capitals are the only decorative move in the type and they do real work: they break a long title into scannable word-starts so it can be read at a glance rather than deciphered. The illustration withholds the story - a figure looks back at you from a river that goes nowhere visible - so the appeal is curiosity rather than any stated benefit. The flat, heavily outlined drawing and the few solid colours are chosen so the whole thing survives the lithographic process and street distance.
Steal this when
Use this when you are promoting a long-form work whose entire pull is a place, an experience or an author's name rather than a benefit. Run one atmospheric framed image above a plain typographic block, and highlight the initial capitals so a long title can still be read in one pass.