Colleen Dunn Bates became a publisher almost in spite of herself. “I started in the book business unintentionally,” she laughs, sitting at a conference table in the Altadena office of Prospect Park Books, the independent imprint she founded in 2006. “It was the only job I could get.”
Dunn, a sixth-generation Southern Californian, graduated from journalism school at USC in the early 1980s. Following a stint at a community newspaper in Toluca Lake, she ended up as an editorial assistant at Los Angeles’s now-defunct Knapp Press, working on the Gault Millau series of travel guides. “I was terrified,” she remembers, “but that was my entry to the book world.”
Prospect Park (the name comes from Dunn’s old Pasadena neighborhood) has published more than 70 titles, with 12 scheduled for 2018. Among its authors are mystery novelist Naomi Hirahara, television writer Phoef Sutton, and Los Angeles Times columnist Chris Erskine. The office walls are lined with bookshelves and over-size cover images. On a Thursday afternoon, two staffers work on upcoming titles at computers, busy in a focused way.
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