American Notes WHEELER-DEALERS

It is a slim volume of anecdotes and fragments of speeches that has sold a modest but respectable 17,000 copies. That would mean $10,000 to most writers. But Reflections of a Public Man ($5.95) has earned its author, House Speaker Jim Wright, a princely $54,642, which is about five times the publishing industry's standard royalty. The munificent publisher is Carlos Moore, a printer in Wright's Fort Worth congressional district and one of his early supporters. As it turns out, Moore was paid $265,000 for work done during Wright's re-election campaign last year.

Wright also earned more than $30,000 in 1986 from an investment partnership with George Mallick, another longtime supporter. Mallick was one of the principals in a project to redevelop Fort Worth's stockyards that could have received a large chunk of $30 million in federal appropriations earmarked for the area by Wright. One of Mallick's businesses paid Wright's wife Betty a $1,500 monthly consultant's fee for at least three years, and the Wrights regularly stay in a Mallick-owned apartment in Fort Worth. Wright insists his support for the project was justified. "My interest," he told the Washington Post, "is civic rather than financial."