Like saying goodbye to Debussy or Hemingway or H.G. Wells. I
 first met Fulton in Berkeley in 1958 when we founded COSMEP, a small press org that had yearly conventions here, there and everywhere.
 St. Paul, Minnesota, New Orleans, New York, you name it. And everyone
 would be there, all the editors of small presses and lit mags. And poets and other writers. Always reading-shows, and I'd always read.
 I got to know EVERYONE in the literary scene. And visited Fulton up in
 his place in Paradise, California, way in the middle of nowhere, or everywhere, if what you loved was  California wilderness.

Tall dark-haired, a little moustache, always bright, on the ball, kind of Harvard  professorish, but at the same time a kind of
 exploratory cowboy explorer always moving further into the essence of
 Nature itself. For years, two or three times a year I'd get a huge envelope  filled with books and literary reviews to review for SMALL PRESS REVIEW, and he slowly turned me into a kind of central writer for the  mag. Which I loved. Sadly COSMEP slowly disappeared over the years. Run  by Richard Morris in San Francisco, it's a book in itself to go through  the slow decapitations of all our dreams and hopes. But Morris died  from cancer and COSMEP kind of died with him.There's a huge file over  in Special Collections at the Michigan State Univerity library dealing
 with my connections with the death of COSMEP.

 A couple of years back Fulton turned SPR into an on-line  mag, which I wasn't crazy about. But he'd always send me a printed copy too, and I've got this huge file in my bookcases, years and years and  years of copies with my reviews in them.

 In the last few years he became increasingly solitary.
 Suffering from lung cancer, but not aware that was what was going
 on. When I recently told him that I'm dying from cancer, he wrote a
 beautiful letter back and mentioned he wasn't "quite up to it" either.
 But I don't think he was aware it was lung cancer.

 He was/is a central figure in the development of literary
 culture in the U.S. He published an INTERNATIONAL DIRECTORY OF LITTLE  MAGAZINES AND SMALL PRESSES which I always found of central importance  in finding publishers for my books and articles. An odd name for a  press -- Dustbooks. Always aware of the transience of life and  everything surrounding him/us. Always Señor High Concentration, High  Seriousness. I couldn't believe the size of the library in his Paradise  ranchhouse. I asked him "Any of my stuff here?," and he walked over the  showed me volume after volume after volume, almost everything I'd ever  written, the whole library a veritable treasurehouse of literary  treasures.

 His death is a huge loss. Will his son, Tim, continue the
 SMALL PRESS REVIEW and all the rest of it?
 No words from him.

 Hard to believe Fulton is really "gone." I always
 thought of him, and still think of him, as an IMMORTAL.

*Hugh Fox is a founding ediot of the Pushcart Prize, and has been widely published in the small press.