Word: flumiani
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...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...
...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...