Fulcrum Press was founded in London in the mid-1960s by medical student Stuart Montgomery (born 1938, in Rhodesia) and his wife Deidre. Montgomery later was an eminent neurologist and expert in depression. The press published major American and British poets in the modernist and the avant-garde traditions in carefully designed books on good paper. The Fulcrum Press made a significant contribution to the British Poetry Revival.
Montgomery published Basil Bunting's Loquitur (1965), First Book of Odes(1965), Ode II/2 (1965), his landmark Briggflatts: An Autobiography (1966) and the same poet's Collected Poems (1968). 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 (* 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. Stuart Montgomery published two books of his own poems, Circe (1969) and Shabby Sunshine (1973), and his medical study Measures of Depression (1978).
When Fulcrum Press folded in the 1970s most of the stock was pulped.
Famous quotes containing the words fulcrum and/or press:
“The obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. In it lies the opportunity of all victory and all progress. Whether it call itself fatality, death, night, or matter, it is the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty and the spirit. For it represents resistance—that is to say, the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development and its triumph.”
—Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881)
“Whereas the comic confronts simply logical contradictions, the tragic confronts a moral predicament. Not minor matters of true and false but crucial questions of right and wrong, good and evil face the tragic character in a tragic situation.”
—Marie Collins Swabey. Comic Laughter, ch. 7, Yale University Press (1961)