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.
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