Big Times In A Small Town

Concord, Massachusetts, is everything a small New England town should be, and the Concord Bookshop, an independent bookseller widely regarded as one of the best in the Northeast, is a large presence in the community. But an in-house dispute between the bookshop’s owners and its employees is tearing the store apart, and the whole town, with its sizable population of well-known writers, seems to be getting involved. Eight employees, including the bookshop’s three top managers, have resigned, with one of them saying that “the fragile alchemy that made it such a great place to work [has] died.” But the owners insist that they love the shop as much as anyone, and are only trying to survive in an increasingly difficult era for indie booksellers.