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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.