You’d think America’s biggest brick and mortar bookseller would be sitting in the catbird seat right now, what with what looks like the impending demise of America’s second-biggest bookselling chain. Then there’s the fact that, as Jason Boog reported in a Galley Cat report, Barnes & Noble announced just two weeks ago that its sales for the fourth quarter — and the holiday season — were its best sales in “more than a decade.”

So what on earth possessed the company to fire most of its most important buyers and merchandising departments in a bloodbath that shocked executives at all the big houses yesterday? Among the 50 people estimated to have been fired were the longtime — and in many instances beloved — buyers in charge of cookbooks, business books, mystery books, and parenting books, as well as the merchandise director for fiction and history, and someone close to the heart of indie publishers, Marcella Smith, director of small press and vendor relations. And, as a Publishers Weekly report by Jim Milliot notes, the company didn’t even say “how duties of the departed buyers and others would be divided up.”

Instead, as another report on Shelf Awareness notes, the company issued a surprisingly insensitive statement saying, “We made a small number of organizational changes this week that are designed to better align our resources with our business. Barnes & Noble is a growing company with both our revenues and new hires growing faster than they have in years.”

Which, of course, only raised eyebrows and worries further. As Milliot reports in PW, “Publishers were shook by the news with the larger publishers wondering who would oversee merchandising, while smaller presses questioned who would be looking out for their interests. The growth in digital is great, one publisher noted, but added ‘someone has to be in charge of getting books into the stores.'” In its report, the ever-friendly Shelf Awareness, meanwhile, let loose a bit of harsh editorializing, something rarely seen in the popular trade newsletter:  “The gutting of the buying department with the loss of many longtime, respected buyers who were key parts of the growth of B&N in the past 20 years, seems a drastic and short-sighted move.”

So what gives? Speculation and anger were neck and neck at most publishing houses in New York yesterday. Many in the indie world feared that the firing of Marcella Smith meant the company would be paying less attention to the work of small presses. But on the other hand, the company also fired its cookbook buyer, and it’s not going to stop selling cookbooks — probably its first or second biggest selling section.

Which only makes the reasoning here all the more opaque: What possessed B&N to not only fire such important employees, but to do it in such a cynical (or is it desperate) bad-publicity-be-damned style?

It remains a mystery, but there is a general consensus that it has something to do with B&N being shaken by what’s happened to Borders, and by how the big houses aren’t racing to save Borders, either.  That would mean that B&N was eradicating some big salaries as part of a nascent streamlining program in case its fortunes suddenly turn, too.

Other theories are welcome below. Right now, the only thing that seems clear from the act and the explanation the company offered is that among the released must have been B&N’s head of publicity.