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With the predominant importance of those presses that produced newspapers of the importance of ‘Y Gwron’, ‘Y Gwladgarwr’ and ‘Tarian y Gweithiwr’ it's easy to forget that many other presses relied on ‘ordinary printing work’. However even presses such as these joined the vision of the industries founding fathers by producing books and pamphlets of poetry and plays by both national and local authors.

Despite the importance of the printing industry in Aberdare for over eighty years, not one of the great presses that published works of the significance of ‘Y Gwron’ and ‘Tarian y Gweithiwr’ survived into modern times.

The decline in the Welsh language plays the major part in the end of the printing industry in and around Aberdare. However the failure of any of the great presses of Aberdare to adapt too this and survive in some form into modern times, was in the main due to the fact that within the print works there were no natural successors to those men who founded them. Idealistic men of conviction and endeavour. Men who wanted to establish not commercial printers, but presses to produce newspapers to inform and educate the ‘workingman’.

When they died so did the drive and zeal that had once made the presses of Aberdare great. Presses of such significance that in 1867 it was said of Aberdare:

‘What we think today -
Wales will think tomorrow’