It’s time for me to relate how, some two decades ago, I helped usher South African writing and publishing into the digital age.

I know that it’s time because of a chance encounter I had earlier this month in Newark Liberty International Airport, New Jersey, with another such character who lives at the crossroads of books and tech.

Now, Newark airport does not match the kind of place that might spring into your imagination, having watched, for example, old episodes of The Sopranos, or new episodes of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. That is to say: happily for its travellers, Newark airport has no personality.

From top to bottom, Terminal A to Terminal C (yes, I’ve huffed my way through them all), the place has been renovated into the built equivalent of a tube of lip gloss. The concourses are like infinite casinos without gambling, endlessly looping on themselves. Shops, eateries and high-tech seating (at which you can charge all your devices) slide past with mind-numbing uniformity as you seek your gate. If travel were a video game — how often it seems to be! — Newark airport is where all the NPCs got stuck.

As I say, this is a boon for travellers, who really just want someplace clean to sit and be left alone. Newark airport offers a banquet for those who feast on such moments.

And there I was, seated, alone and feasting when I happened to glance at Facebook, and saw the following post from an FB friend with whom I had not been in contact for ages — but who is the very person who helped me get my start at the above-mentioned crossroads of books and tech, some 20 years ago:

“Crazy question with an unusual motive: is anyone I know at Newark airport right now?”

Minutes after replying to Arthur Goldstuck that I, in fact, happened to be at Newark airport, I found myself seated opposite the man in — get this — a secret restaurant ensconced in the heart of Terminal A, whose coordinates are known only to a select few, ordering a delicious glass of Napa Sauvignon Blanc (with ice on the side, as is the South African way), before dashing off to catch my flight.

Newark airport, shiny, bland and devoid of personality? I’ll be damned if it is!

For there we were, clinking glasses in a hidden spot, a writer whose latest, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI, was ranked number one at Exclusive Books Hyde Park that very week, and a web publisher whose first site got its name, BOOK SA, from a domain that the writer had graciously given up, back when blogging was at its peak. Both of us were soon to be on our merry (and opposite) ways, but for now we revelled in the sequence of chance that had brought us together again.

Earlier, I said that this column would be about how I helped the South African books world enter the age of the internet.

The potted history goes something like this: in 2004 or 2005, I wrote to Arthur asking if he’d give me the domain book.co.za, as I had an idea for an online literary community of writers and publishers, plus the technical know-how to make it outshine the bigger sites, and needed the domain to bring the project into being.

Without a second thought he agreed, and a few months later BOOK SA was born — a platform that saw a good deal of success, and went through many permutations over the years, eventually ending up as today’s Sunday Times Books.

Creating and managing the site and its community made for heady wine, for me: I was drunk on it for more than a decade.

But as a wise man once said, everything is about something else, and this column’s actual purpose is to serve as an IOU. For I foolishly allowed Arthur to pay for my drink at Newark airport’s secret restaurant, when in fact, I should have been buying round after round for him, the living legend who had, once again, opened a door for me.

In New Jersey, of all places.

Next drinks are for my account, then, Arthur — and hopefully long before 2044. Cheers. DM