Welsh Journals

ISAAC JONES, MUSIC PRINTER AND PUBLISHER RHIDIAN GRIFFITHS The popularity of music in nineteenth-century Wales inspired a good deal of activity in the field of music printing and publishing. While such activity was never on the scale of the major European publishing houses, or even the London firms like Novello and Boosey, it represented a significant amount of the output of certain publishers in Welsh communities. There were firms which undertook music publishing as part of their work: such were Cwmni y Cyhoeddwyr Cymreig (The Welsh Publishing Company) in Caernarfon and Hughes and Son in Wrexham. But most were printers who combined their fair share of jobbing printing with work on music, such as Robert Jones of Bethesda, Isaac Clarke of Rhuthun, Benjamin Parry of Swansea, Daniel Lewis Jones, 'Cynalaw', of Briton Ferry, and J. R. Lewis of Carmarthen. Towards the end of the century and in the early years of the twentieth there emerged publishers who were retailers rather than printers, men like E. D. Williams, the proprietor of the North Wales Music Co., Bangor; David Trehearn of Rhyl; and most notably, D. J. Snell of Swansea.1 Of the printer-publishers who took advantage of the growing market for Welsh choral and solo music in the latter half of the nineteenth century, one of the most prolific and successful was Isaac Jones of Treherbert in the Rhondda Valley. Born at Pentre Dafis in the parish of Cynwyl Gaeo, Carmarthenshire, in August 1835, Isaac Jones moved with his family to Cil-y-cwm near Llanymddyfri and from there to Ystradgynlais in the Upper Swansea Valley, where he was to spend his youth. The record of the 1861 census shows him working as a blacksmith, and it is unclear when he made the transition from one hot metal craft to another and became a printer. In 1868 he moved from Ystradgynlais to the parish of Ystradyfodwg, Rhondda, to establish himself in the area later to become known as Treherbert. Initially he appears to have practised as a bookseller but, in 1872, he established a printing