I’m no audiophile. I mean, I like music, but who doesn’t? But I had to have the musical significance of “the minor fall and the major lift” from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” explained to me, twice, I haven’t seen live music performed by anyone I don’t know personally in a year, and I haven’t owned a piece of vinyl since junior high school.

I know many audiophiles, however, and one of the many things that has long boggled me about them is their loyalty to specific record labels. Regardless of how different the sounds, they become a fan of everything that label puts out. Following artists is one thing, I get that; I own everything Los Lobos ever produced, 90% of the Anthony Burgess library, and love even mediocre Tim Burton films. But I couldn’t cotton on to following producers.

And then, two years ago, I picked up Firmin by Sam Savage for a school project, a very human tale of a literate rat living in a blighted Boston neighborhood, published by Coffee House Press. Utterly charmed, I was primed to quickly pull the trigger a month later when I noticed that a book I was sniffing around, The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson, was published by the same press. This noir unwinds in an engaging three-part structure, revolving around the violent and disputed Mormon doctrine of blood atonement. I actually sought out the third, pulling Laird Hunt’s The Exquisite from Coffee House’s list of new releases before being blown away by its unreliable narrator sliding through fractured realities in post-9/11 NYC.

By that time, I realized that there was something special here. None of these books had anything in common but their publisher, and yet they must have. There was a sensibility at work, a strange commonplace that led me to love them all for different reasons and yet somehow in the same way.

Most recently, I picked up The Ocean in the Closet by Yuko Taniguchi, more to test this theory than anything else. It stands as entirely distinct from the previous three Coffee House novels, a beautiful family and cultural epic that sweeps across the Pacific and across decades, chronicling a young girl’s attempt to understand her own and her family’s history. And it is beautiful and hauntingly poignant.

Coffee House Press’ booklist is dominated, as is common among small, independent presses, by poetry collections, and I can’t speak to them, but I will now make an effort to try out any novel they decide to publish.

I recently shared this revelation with an audiophile friend of mine.

“Yeah, its just like porn blogs.”

“What now?”

“You know, blogs that cross-post picture and movies. They don’t make anything themselves, but you can find those that just somehow fit your tastes. Celebrities versus amateurs, moody black-and-whites or shocking anatomicals. The defining aesthetic appeals.”

So maybe that’s it. Audiophile, bibliophile, and perv, we find producers that get us off. And even if we can’t say why, it’s enough to become a fan.