The Second Coming
By W. B. Yeats
St. Paul, Minnesota: Strong Silent Type Press, 2010. Edition of 20.

11.25 x 14.5"; 24 pages. Printed from polymer plates on BFK Rives Gray. Font is Myriad Pro. Three-color intaglio prints (the rectangular images) by Hagstrom from plastic plates applied to the base paper with chine-collé. Metal engravings by Gillespie (the round images) are printed in color then applied chine-collé to the base sheet of paper. Chine-collé paper is Iwaki. Bound in cloth-covered boards with a circular metal engraving (by Gillespie) on the front cover.

Strong Silent Type Press: "The Second Coming is based on the poem by William Butler Yeats. The book contains five hand engraved intaglio prints by Oscar Gillespie, and five intaglio prints by Fred Hagstrom. ...Yeats' text is about moments of great change in the world, evoking images from the Middle East and the beginning of Christianity. We chose this text because we think it is a beautiful poem, but also quite significant at this point in time, still close to the millennium, and at a time of violent change in the Middle East. We chose not to do a literal illustration of the images from the poem, but instead hope that we have served the text well through our own interpretation of it."

Fred Hagstrom: "Each of us tried in our own ways to respond to the poem. Neither of us wanted to do illustration in the sense of actually depicting a visual image from the poem. ... I like a kind of very open response to the text in which you can still relate the images to the text. … Oscar and I discussed a little bit the fact that his son has served in the Middle East during this time, and I certainly feel that the text – moments of great change, the ideas of changes at the end of important time periods, along with how much of the poem invokes images from the Middle East – none of this can be separated from the current wars there."
(SOLD)