I enjoy the challenge of designing a "period piece," though I'll usually try for something that evokes the impression left by that something else, rather than trying to duplicate it down to the smallest detail. I'll keep clear of typography that seems too anachronistic (even if only to a few people well-versed enough to spot such inconsistency), but I won't hesitate to use something that I think conveys the spirit of that something else. (In this case, a poster might have been largely hand-lettered, which wasn't an option, anyway.)
What I hoped to do here was bring to mind the spirit of an old theatre poster, to kinda get people into the spirit of the material. (The book is a collection of comedy sketches from the Burlesque stage.)
I spent time trying a few different methods to "age" the paper, or make it look a bit beat-up — not because the paper would have looked so old or so beat-up back in the day, but because that's the lens we would see that kind of object through now. In any event, though, I never did find a subtle way to make that work as well as I'd have hoped, so instead I just used some slightly darker patches to take the edge off of the yellow (which is a bit more bright than it appears here).
(That Cooper Black on the bottom is sort of the odd-man-out — but I had already used that in the bookblock (before I'd even considered the cover) and I felt it would be better to tie everything together.)
Not much to the sketch, but hey, here it is:
