Books: Literary Rotolactor

There is one Manhattan publishing house the less since a Federal jury found sleek, Italian-born Carlo M. Flumiani guilty on 12 charges of mail fraud last fortnight. This week Judge Simon H. Rifking sentenced him to 18 months in jail, a $2,500 fine. But nobody will miss Fortuny, Inc., or Publisher Flumiani. A particularly heartless and lucrative operator in what is known to the book trade as “vanity publishing,” Publisher Flumiani was convicted of mulcting, since 1935, several thousand gullible authors of around $500.000 by making them pay for the publication of their books—mostly tripe.

If the authors’ vanity and cash alone had been involved, Assistant U.S. District Attorney Rudolf Halley would have had no case.* But as Attorney Halley made clear, vanity was the mere come-on, and something more solid than glory was dangled ahead. Mr. Flumiani’s authors were generally poor and innocent enough to fall for the flagrant letterhead, “A Fortune To Gain In Each Fortuny Book”; and Mr. Flumiani was ingeniously equipped to hand out whatever further encouragement was needed.

As the Revel Syndicate, a literary agency, he received manuscripts (at a “marketing fee” of $4 to $7), praised them, shelved them for 30 days. As one of four presses (the Minerva, the Prometheus, the Pegasus, the Psychology), he then described himself as nibbling; and shelved the manuscript for another 30 days. At that point the house of Fortuny was foaming to print and sell the book, if only the author would come across with “part of” the manufacturing costs. The Fortuny contract promised the author 20% royalties on the first 3,000 copies sold, 50% thereafter. For some, there were extras: “subscription” (for publicity); or “revision,” at 30 to 50¢ per page. For $25 the author’s picture was used as a frontispiece.

Revisions were handled by Editor-in-Chief Irene Watson, an 18-year-old graduate of Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge High School, who received $13.60 a week for her services, and realized no more clearly than the authors that she was helping run a roto-lactor. Some 40 other high-school kids, delighted to be in the publishing game at similar wages, sent out Mr. Flumiani’s oleaginous form letters. The “season paragraph” told the author that the time (any old time) was ripe to bursting for his book to appear. The “fighting paragraph” bucked him up if he seemed to feel his work was unworthy of publication. The “action paragraph” read: “We believe that this book is an original. It reveals an individual mind. It possesses the characteristics of an unusual contribution to present literature….Its style is of exquisite quality.” In Flumiani’s form book there were 146 such paragraphs, tailored to meet every conceivable contingency. If the author seemed to be dubious of the whole show, the Associated Publishers of North America (a Flumiani letterhead) endorsed Fortuny as a reliable house.

Fortuny’s authors paid Mr. Flumiani anywhere from $200 to over $1,000 each for printing their books. Generally a hundred copies or so were printed, at a cost to Fortuny of 12 to 25¢ per copy. In his last 18 months in business, Mr. Flumiani published 117 books. Of the total income for that period, $92,793, $77,891 came from the authors, the rest from sales, including sales to the authors of their own books. Most of this money went into the business, which in those months expanded from 6 to 40 employes; Mr. Flumiani got only $7,000. In royalties, meanwhile, his collective authors received $77.84.

In the course of the trial, Sinclair Lewis testified that he had never in his life paid to have a word of his printed. Various of Mr. Flumiani’s victims also appeared:

> Dr. John B. Boland, of Sterling, Ill. He paid $429.50 to have published a 32-page volume of his short stories, Ships That Sail. Cost to Fortuny was $67.95.

> Rev. Edward Gholson of Winston-Salem, N.C., a Negro pastor, paid $374.25 (on a bill for $436.81) for publication of a 56-page book (Aphorisms of Wit and Wisdom) and was, with his Confucian aphorisms, one of the Government’s star witnesses.

> O. J. Waters of Tilton, N.H., a crippled artist, paid out more than $550 on his booklet of prose and verse, Embers. He told the jury, in a voice hardly above a whisper, that the Pegasus Publishing Co. had written him: “Your manuscript represents an original contribution to our present literature.”

For such authors, Publisher Flumiani had with godlike impartiality brought forth a joke book, a treatise on diet, amorous poetry, a book of advice on whom to marry. He even published one man’s book on how to make money as an author.

* Many a legitimate publisher sometimes lets the author share the costs.