Travelers planning a journey to Portland, Ore.—or simply seeking in-transit reading—can add a bookstore to their itinerary. On October 1, Patrick Leonard opened Postcard Bookshop in Portland’s Central Eastside Industrial District, focusing on global literature and culture, children’s titles, and sidelines including journals and games for people on the move.
Postcard occupies a 300 square foot space inside the Cargo Emporium, a hive of stalls selling international artisan goods. Strands of papel picado and Asian paper lanterns hang from the high ceilings of the warehouse space, and visitors walk by racks of silk kimonos and West African prints on their way to the bookstore area.
Unlike a standalone bookstore, Postcard does not operate a separate till. Cargo Emporium customers check out at the front of the store, which for Leonard means he is "not using any of the industry tools” other than Edelweiss. He chose Shopify for his online store, “which means a lot of data entry on the front end,” unlike other independent bookstores.
In another unusual move, Leonard arranges his shelves according to global regions and not by age, category, or genre. “In every section, I’ve got guidebooks, phrasebooks, nonfiction, and cookbooks, international and translated literature, general travel writing, transportation, maps, and atlases,” he said. He intends the geographic layout to be used "as a prompt for discovery” so that customers can be “open to the serendipity of looking through the shelves.”
While Leonard loves the canonical travel literature of Paul Theroux and Peter Hessler, he said he has "been making an effort to include more native writers, more firsthand accounts, in each section,” he said. For instance, he and his family recently visited Brazil, and his shelves include classics by Mário de Andrade, Machado de Assis, and Clarice Lispector that informed their travels.
He sees strong interest in Japanese fiction right now, too. A reader who stops in for a Lonely Planet guidebook can pick up Hisashi Kashiwai’s Kamogawa Food Detectives series, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, or Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. And he's eager to supply examples of Ukrainian, Palestinian, and North Korean writing, giving readers access to perspectives from regions in conflict.
Prior to opening Postcard, Leonard gained experience in international cookbooks and food writing. From 2013 to 2016, and before Hachette Book Group’s 2021 acquisition of Workman Publishing, he worked in publicity and marketing for Workman’s culinary and lifestyle imprint, Artisan Books. After moving back to his home city of Portland, he spent eight years as the buying director of a Portland specialty grocer, Providore Fine Foods.
“I was looking for a way to get more closely connected to food and books, and I needed to get some retail experience,” Leonard said. He considered opening a cookbook store, and Providore offered the opportunity to test-market books for foodies.
At Providore, Leonard said, he "curated a collection of cookbooks and food-related titles that were global in scope,” including reference books, fiction, and manga, and the 100-square-foot book display at Providore helped him envision his own shop. He also reached out to Lara Hamilton, owner of the Book Larder in Seattle, who he called "very generous with her time and advice, knowledge and connections."
On October 5, Leonard threw a grand opening party for Postcard, with international drinks and fare, making Ukrainian, Scottish, and Lebanese cookies from the cookbooks that he carries in the store. This month, vendors at the Emporium have built an altar for the upcoming Day of the Dead, so the bookshop will feature titles representing Latin American heritage, from Raúl the Third’s holiday-themed picture book ¡Vamos! to Mariana Enriquez’s horror fiction in A Sunny Place for Shady People, translated by Megan McDowell.
“It’s a cliché at this point, that you can travel through a book,” Leonard said, yet reading can “make you feel like you’re embedded in a culture.” Postcard Bookshop, surrounded by imported crafts and furniture, helps readers imagine their international destinations.
