Time and the hour (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
The lettering is not laid over the picture, it is a structural member of it. TIME, AND THE and HOUR box the figures in on three sides, so the eye cannot separate reading the name from seeing the scene, and the title is memorised as an image. Printing the letterforms as bare paper rather than as ink means the cheapest colour on the sheet is the loudest, and the two inks go entirely into the faces. The two heads, one old and hollow, one young and laughing, make an abstract magazine title into a joke about time that a passer-by gets in under a second.
Steal this when
Steal this when a name is the only asset you have to sell, with no offer, no price and no product feature. Build the layout out of the name itself, let the illustration grow into the gaps, and pick an image that makes the name mean something in one glance.