Travis Smith of the Press Room Credit: John Anderson

There’s nowhere like a letterpress printworks. The air is rich with the perfume of oil and ink, and the walls resonate with the gentle clunk and whir of the machinery. They’re also a place of history, and Travis Smith, managing partner of the Press Room, is keeping those traditions alive through the Press Room.

For most people, a printer is just an annoying white box that sucks down toner cartridges and jams for no reason. What happens in this small industrial enclave at the Baker Center is real printing: thick inks, heavy rollers, handcrafted print blocks and plates in metal and wood. Here, it’s neither a lost trade nor a dying art, and Smith takes pleasure in watching visitors create their own print for the very first time in their lives. “It’s immediate,” said Smith. “You can walk in and in 45 seconds go, ‘Oh, I get it.’”

Aside from running the Press Room, he’s also Tim and Karrie League’s right hand for the Baker Center and a de facto supe when they’re away. “I love this place,” he said. “I’m a preservationist, and I love to see old buildings get a second chance, so it’s been really exciting to be a participant and a tenant and a steward of this place.”

But his real job and real passion is providing hands-on experience with letterpress art. The core of the collection is over 60,000 blocks for movie ads. For decades, the key to promoting films wasn’t trailers or posters, but illustrated ads in newspapers, most of which were produced by KB Typesetting in Omaha, Nebraska. The first step was creating proofs that could then be duplicated and shipped to news outlets around the country. Most of those duplicates wound up in the trash, but by sheer good luck KB’s complete proof collection ended up in an antique store in Omaha. Even more fortuitously, that discovery became the subject of Adam Roffman’s 2017 short documentary, “The Collection,” screened at South by Southwest, which Tim League happened to see, and he became committed to acquiring and preserving the whole archive as a unique piece of film history.

Smith became fascinated by letterpress back when he was working in a used bookstore in Houston’s historic Montrose district and wandered into the Printing Museum. “That’s where I started learning about the true analog print method, and that true analog texture you get from old printing methods.” He became a volunteer at the museum, then a professional press operator. In 2019, he heard from Alamo Drafthouse designer Kevin Muñoz that the Leagues needed a manager for their new project. Having seen Roffman’s documentary himself, he knew about the collection, “but when I walked in this space I went, ‘Yup, yup, this is mine.’”

Smith and League’s dream of keeping this kind of mechanical, tactile printing alive has been a massive success. Aside from running classes and corporate training events and an expanding portfolio of external clients, Smith throws open the doors to the adjoining cafetorium so guests at events hosted by fellow tenants like the Texas Archive of the Moving Image and friends of the Baker like Graham Reynolds’ Golden Hornet can take home a freshly rolled memento of the night. Through it all, they’re keeping an incredible resource of film and design history together and being used the way it was intended. Smith said, “You get the full breadth of the American cinema landscape – Westerns, sci-fi, horror, thrillers, New Hollywood. That’s all in the collection.”

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This article appears in January 23 • 2026.

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The Chronicle's first Culture Desk editor, Richard has reported on Austin's growing film production and appreciation scene for over a decade. A graduate of the universities of York, Stirling, and UT-Austin, a Rotten Tomatoes certified critic, and eight-time Best of Austin winner, he's currently at work on two books and a play.