After I took a writing class from the poet and novelist Kate Gale just over 15 years ago, she told me she was considering moving her small-press publishing house, Red Hen, to Pasadena.

But she didn’t know the town. She wanted to figure it out.

Did I know the mayor?

I did, and I took them out to lunch together.

“Let me talk to Ken McCormick,” Bill Bogaard told us. “He owns that land behind Vroman’s, and there’s that little brown-shingled cottage on Union Street, former dentist’s office, sitting empty.”

Red Hen Press — then HQed where Kate and her husband, Mark Cull, had founded it, in their San Fernando Valley home — made the move and today proudly sports the motto: “Biggest Little Indie Nonprofit Literary Publishers.” They publish over 25 poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction books each year, over 550 titles to date.

It’s the real deal as a business — in its time in Pasadena, its operating budget has gone from around $500,000 annually to almost $1.5 million.

But when Kate moved her company into the cottage on Union, she saw there was a weird disadvantage to working right behind the biggest independent bookstore in Southern California: “The staff was constantly in danger of spending all their paychecks at Vroman’s!”

Kate took me out for a celebratory coffee last week at Stumptown on Lincoln Avenue, just up the street from her large current standalone offices, with over 7,000 square feet that include a performance stage and room to store about 100,000 volumes of inventory. The former site of a Black church that needed more room to grow, it’s become a community institution of its own — it’s where those of us in the Arroyo Seco neighborhood go to vote, for instance.

“I went out to lunch again with Bill when we moved here,” Kate told me. “He had a few words of warning: ‘Pasadena is complicated,’ he said.” While that’s certainly true, Kate and Mark have thrived. And much of the reason, Kate says, was in “Bill’s commitment to building the cultural life of the city.”

Unless you are a deep reader of current poets and of literary fiction, you won’t have heard of many of the authors on Red Hen’s list — which is not to say you shouldn’t dive in. I have a cool point of entry right here on my dining-table desk at home: South Pasadena poet laureate Ron Koertge’s “I Dreamed I was Emily Dickinson’s Boyfriend”: “She’s older than me so she can buy beer at any 7-Eleven. She likes a liquor never brewed. Which 7-Eleven doesn’t carry.”

And it’s in having such a deep list of authors that Red Hen can put on, as it did last month with the Pasadena Literary Alliance, a boffo show at the incomparable A Noise Within stage in East Pas that the national magazine Poets & Writers called “Literary Titans Percival Everett and David Mas Masumoto in Conversation.” Red Hen publishes some titles by both the author of the No. 1 bestselling novel “James” and the author of one of the greatest books ever to be written about California agriculture. “Epitaph for a Peach.” An unlikely pairing of genius — right up Red Hen’s alley.

Kate now travels the world representing her press at the biggest book fairs. “At first I was worried about saying ‘Pasadena’ at some place like Frankfurt,” she said. “Should I just say Los Angeles? But I completely underestimated people knowing us here. ‘Rose Bowl, Rose Parade, JPL, the Huntington,’ they said. They know us.”

What’s next for Red Hen?

“The same amount of books each year, but with the lead titles having bigger print runs,” she says. Now, a big book is 5,000 copies sold. She wants to go above and beyond that, and has brought in some strategists from the bigger New York publishers. Of Red Hen’s 11 staff members, seven of them are on the actual “book” side — editors and the like. “We are still a little kayak that can turn.” One of the directions it’s turning toward is audiobooks, the fastest-growing part of the market, and podcasts. E-books such as those read on a Kindle never quite took off for younger generations, Kate says.

“I still think when you take a real book and sit down on the couch or in the backyard, it signals to the brain that you’re not working. You’re doing it for enjoyment. We all spend our working lives with hours in front of screens.”

The good news for future book-reading, Kate says, is that young people today grew up reading “long. long books: ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘The Hunger Games.’ In print.” They may well keep it up. The bad news: “Publishing is a hard business.”

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com