By the time commercial radio made its first spectacular successes, in the early days of Vallee and Amos and Andy, a new form of publication had established itself, a fresh combination of text and picture, devoted to fact and deriving more entertainment from fact than the old straight fiction magazine had offered. These three new means of mass communication are revolutionary inventions of democracy. To use them is the first obligation of statesmanship. They have been seized by dictators; literally, for the first move of a _coup d'etat_ is to take over the radio and the next is to divert the movies into propaganda. Before these instruments can be used, their nature has to be understood and their meaning to the average man has to be calculated. _Words and Pictures_ Of the fact and picture publications _Life_ and _Look_ are the best examples; _Time_ and _News-Week_ are fact and illustration magazines which is basically different, although their success is also important. The appetite for fact appears in a nation supposed to be adolescent and given over to the silliest of romantic fictions; _Time_ and the _Readers' Digest_ become the great magazine phenomena of our time, growing in seriousness as they understand better the temper of their readers, learning to present fact forcefully, directing themselves to maturity, and helping to create mature minds. Their faults are private trifles, their basic editorial policies are public services. The word and picture magazine is not yet completely realized; both its chief examples grow and develop, but the full integration of word and image is yet to come. It is probably the most significant development in communication since the depression struck; it promises to rescue the printed page from the obscurity into which radio, the movies, and conservatism in format were pushing books and magazines and newspapers. It is odd that book publication, the oldest use of quantity production, should have so long been content with relatively small circulations. Changes now are apparent. The most interesting developments in recent years are mail-order selling (the basis of the book clubs) and mass selling over the counter, the method of the Pocketbook series. Both withdraw book-sales from the stuffiness of old methods and the artiness of book "shoppes" which always got in the way of good book-sellers. The text-and-image publication need not be a magazine; the method is especially applicable to argument, to the pamphlet and the report. The art of visualization has progressed in the making of charts and isotypes and in the pure intellectual grasp of the function of the visual. The economic and technical problems of the use of color have been solved and all the effectiveness of images has been multiplied by the contrast and clarity which color provides. A new language is in process of being formed.