When Rachel Kimbrow first started teaching at public schools around the Portland area, bilingual books for her Spanish speaking students were hard to come by, limited mostly to translations of popular authors like Dr. Seuss.

During a 20-year career as a teacher in both Portland and Paraguay, Kimbrow got good at finding the kinds of books her students craved — stories about soccer, about the folklore of their ancestral countries or alphabet books where A is for Arroz, not Apple — written first in the language they spoke at home.

Now, in a modest storefront on Northeast Glisan Street at the edge of the Montavilla neighborhood, she has opened Linda Letra, Portland’s first bilingual bookstore dedicated to children’s books and perhaps the first of its kind in the state.

The metro area has two branches of Japanese book retailer Kinokuniya, one in downtown Portland and one in Beaverton, and Persida Bookstore in the Hazelwood neighborhood that specializes in Russian and Ukrainian titles, but no free-standing brick-and-mortar shop that specializes in Spanish language titles, until now.

The goal, Kimbrow said, is to be a resource for Spanish-speaking families, parents who want to introduce their children to Spanish and teachers and librarians who still spend hours — and often, their own money — combing through catalogues to curate bilingual children’s books for classrooms and school libraries.

“I’m always on the lookout for first edition Spanish books. I think a lot of teachers are too. They want authentic books, where meaning is not lost in translation,” Kimbrow said. “Linguistically diversifying their collections helps build connections with families,” who see themselves in the books their children bring home, she added.

The Portland area has long been a hotbed for niche bookstores dedicated to children’s books, including the lovingly curated Green Bean Books on Northeast Alberta Street, the sprawling A Children Place Bookstore on Northeast Fremont Street, which recently marked its 40th anniversary and downtown Gresham’s cheerful, quirky Maggie Mae’s Bookshop. In 2022, former Powell’s Books employee Edith Johnson opened Sunrise Books in the Beaumont neighborhood, with a focus on multicultural and diverse books for young readers.

All of those bookstores set aside a healthy amount of space for books in Spanish. But only Linda Letra (in Spanish: “good handwriting”) dedicates its entire storefront, from board books for baby read-alouds (or for gnawing on) to complex middle grade readers.

In fact, there are only a handful of similarly focused children’s bilingual bookstores around the country, Kimbrow said, generally in large urban areas with significant Spanish speaking population. Chicago, for example, has 51st Ward Books; Los Angeles has LA Librería.

Portland’s Spanish-speaking community is smaller, but Kimbrow said she chose her location to be in close proximity to the large number of Spanish speaking families in East Multnomah County, as well as close to the Interstates 84 and 205, to draw families and teachers from Washington, Clackamas, Marion and Clark Counties.

Inventory is still filling out, before a scheduled grand opening on September 16. But Kimbrow said she’s been sourcing hard-to-find books from small, often female-owned publishers, many from Southern California, and from landmark events like the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the world’s second-largest book fair, held every November.

Along her shelves, there’s a mix of books written solely in Spanish, books that give equal space to English and Spanish versions of the same text and books that mix the two languages together. There’s also a small but mighty selection of books that draw on the varied Indigenous languages spoken around the Americas, including the Mayan languages common in those with Guatemalan heritage and Mixtec languages spoken in a handful of Mexican states and municipalities.

Kimbrow said she’s looking forward to having events, including Spanish storytimes at the store and potentially helping to sponsor a Spanish version of Oregon’s popular “Battle of the Books” reading competition. She’ll also be hosting local authors, like artists Nelda Reyes and Gerardo Calderon who collaborated on “Huehuetlatolli,” a picture and song book that dives into legends of Indigenous cultures in Mexico.

She’s worked with local school districts, including Portland and Centennial, to help them source and select bundles of Spanish and bilingual books, including on themes that teachers request, like social and emotional learning or early readers.

“I try to think about themes that might be good to have not only in a bilingual classroom,” she said, “but in any class that wants to build linguistic diversity.”