Museo Miguel N. Lira

This museum tells the life of Miguel Nicolás Lira, the poet, novelist, playwright and publisher born in Tlaxcala on 14 October 1905, who died in his home city on 26 February 1961. It fills an old house on Avenida Independencia, about 200 metres south of the Plaza de la Constitución, that once held the state government's print shop; the building is a listed historic monument and sits beside the city bullring. The Instituto Tlaxcalteca de Cultura runs it and reopened it in 2015 after a refit that rearranged the rooms and enlarged the collection.

Lira qualified as a lawyer in 1928 and taught literature at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, but his passion was printing. In 1930 he began setting type on a little hand press he nicknamed La Caprichosa, and in 1934 he put out nine issues of the magazine Fábula, whose imprint issued the first books of Octavio Paz and Efraín Huerta along with work by Pablo Neruda, Rafael Alberti and Alfonso Reyes. He went on to head the publishing workshops of UNAM and of the federal education ministry. As a schoolboy he belonged to Los Cachuchas, Frida Kahlo's circle of friends at the Preparatoria.

His novel La escondida won the Lanz Duret prize, and the 1955 film of it broke box-office records in Mexico City and was Mexico's entry at Cannes and Berlin. He also wrote poems such as the Corrido de Domingo Arenas and plays, including the children's piece La muñeca Pastillita, premiered at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1942.

On show are photographs, personal belongings, original manuscripts and dolls he made himself, a movable-type press of the kind he worked with, first editions and the magazines he founded, letters and pictures exchanged with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and the Lira Torres couple's bedroom set up with their own furniture and clothes. The museum also hosts dramatised readings, poetry workshops and talks.