Vignettes of Manhattan by Brander Matthews (1894) - 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 curling smoke line is the piece of design that carries it: one continuous white stroke tying the figure at lower right to the title at upper left, so the eye is walked through the whole sheet instead of choosing between picture and type. Penfield sets the skyline in a middle blue between the night sky and the ground so it reads as background without needing a separate panel, which lets the orange title sit directly on the city. Orange on blue is the sharpest complementary pair available in flat lithography, so the title holds at distance with no outline. The figure is a type rather than a character, the idle uptown swell, which tells the passer-by what class of city the book is about in one glance.
Steal this when
The subject is a place and the selling point is that the reader already lives in it. Put the place's silhouette behind the title, add one figure who is obviously local, and use a single connecting line of movement to join the illustration to the type.