The event took place in that demonstrably endangered of locations, the bookshop. The University Book Shop to be precise. Being simultaneously independent, helpful, eclectic, well stocked - and selling academic titles to boot - this establishment's future should be assured, but in this season of shocks and tremors the same cannot be said of the traditional New Zealand book trade as a whole.
It suffered its own sudden upending last month when REDgroup Retail, parent group of Whitcoulls, Borders and Bennetts bookstores, voluntarily ceded control of the book empire to administrators Australian accounting firm Ferrier Hodgson.
While forensic analysis is yet to be conducted on how it came to this for the once-proud and successful historic New Zealand bookseller - the forerunner of which had its beginnings in Cashel St, Christchurch, in the form of Whitcombe and Tombs around 1882 - it has been widely put about that new digital media and online sales are to blame.
While the future of the New Zealand arms of the business is far from settled, there is undoubtedly some truth in this; just as there is that digital technology, e-commerce and the internet pose arresting challenges for many forms of cultural distribution, including music stores, video outlets and hard-copy print media.
But it is certainly not the whole truth. And it rather masks a central back story in this most desultory and depressing of plots. The main character in this one is private equity.
Private equity is one branch of a sophisticated form of financial endeavour which has rather taken a back seat as related but more highly evolved players in the global financial crisis have emerged to centre stage: devilishly complex financial instruments - such as credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations - that very few, yours truly included, really understand.
But private equity is not quite so complicated. In essence it involves the use of large amounts of low-interest debt to acquire business interests or entities, which are then ruthlessly put through the cost-cutting mill to increase profits.
They are then, typically, sold on to someone else usually at vast gain. Apparently, it's called using borrowed money to make your own money "work harder".
The beauty of it all for the private equity buff is that you don't have to know anything much about the trade you've invested in because there are universal templates to help you make all the right cost-cutting decisions.
And because you are simply in the business to make a killing, you needn't get hung up on things like company history, work culture, sector particularities, employee loyalty or institutional knowledge.
In fact, the less known the better. Familiarity just complicates matters, especially when it comes to firing the staff.
I would not necessarily ascribe to Australian private equity group Pacific Equity Partners, parent of REDgroup Retail, any such specific behaviours because I am not in a position to know about them, but symptomatic tales of the local industry are beginning to emerge.
Here's Karyn Scherer from last Friday's Business Herald in an excellent article on Whitcoulls, "The bookshop that lost the plot".
Inhabitants of the book world claim, she says, "the company's predicament is an all-too-familiar tale of mismanagement: of shiny new executives rubbishing the opinions of experienced staff ... of cash being bled from the business in the form of management fees and interest payments on debt; of relentless cost-cutting that left many of its staff and suppliers utterly demoralised ..."
So who needs the depredations of "e-tailing" when you have this sort of thing going on? Like it or not, the digital genie is out of the box. I sat next to a woman on a plane at the weekend reading a novel via a Kindle.
"It's the cheapest form of buying books," she told a fellow passenger, citing a typical price of $9 a title.
But what are the consequences for books and authors of the digital revolution? By cutting out the middleman and going for high-volume turnover at considerably reduced prices the case can be made that e-books are as good as if not a better bet for the author than the local bookstore.
But, with the potential demise of the same, what future is there for the small local publishers who rely on the marketing exposure and shelf space that accompanies the traditional publishing route?
Sports biographies, cookbooks and celebrity confessions will doubtless continue to thrive with their muscular and saccharine appeal to popular taste.
But the spectrum of possibility for the expression of a thriving intellectual, literary or minority culture - in the propagation and nourishment of which the bookshop has played such a vital part - will be sadly narrowed.
Doubtless the advent of the brave new digital environment will provide opportunities for many. For others it will be the kiss of death, victims softened up for extinction in the clammy embrace of those shiny-suited private equity wallahs.
• Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) at the Otago Daily Times.
