Fulcrum Press (1965 – 1974)[1] was founded in London in the mid-1960s by medical student Stuart Montgomery (born 1938, in Rhodesia) and his wife Deirdre.
Earning a reputation as the premier small press of the late 1960s to early '70s,[2] Fulcrum published major American and British poets in the modernist and the avant-garde traditions in carefully designed books on good paper.
It produced about forty books by more than twenty poets, including Pete Brown, Ed Dorn (Gunslinger 1 & 2, 1970), Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Paul Evans, Roy Fisher, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Donald Gardner (born 1938, For the flames, 1974), Allen Ginsberg, Michael Hamburger, Lee Harwood, Spike Hawkins, Alan Jackson, David Jones, Christopher Middleton, Lorine Niedecker, Jeff Nuttall, George Oppen, Tom Pickard (with a preface by Bunting), Omar S. Pound, F. T. Prince, Tom Raworth, Jerome Rothenberg and Gary Snyder.
Fulcrum Press had much of their printing done by Villiers Press in London, which in the words of Alastair Johnston "was serviceable though typographically uninspired (like the City Lights books they also printed)....However, Montgomery frequently had exceptional cover art from Tom Phillips, Barnett Newman, Patrick Caulfield, Ian Dury, Ron Kitaj or Richard Hamilton.
"[4] The demise of Fulcrum came about as the consequence of a lengthy legal dispute with Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay[5] over the mistaken description of his collection The Dancers Inherit the Party as a first edition[6] when it was published by Montgomery, who was unable to meet the costs of losing the case.