Midway through 1958, Gabriel and Barbara Shakour started publishing a small paper known as The Keene Shopper in an 8x10 room with three desks. The room also happened to be in the basement of their home. Fifty years ago, the “Shopper” was a small publication, containing nothing but advertisements placed by small, local businesses in an effort to improve their profits and educate local consumers. Fifty years later, you hold in your hands the natural evolution of that tiny advertising publication, a business that has grown up around it, and the hard work and dedication of three generations of employees, family, and local business owners. From that one basement room sprang a weekly community newspaper that’s had its own building since the early 1960s, has increased its circulation from 14,000 in 1958 to 42,000 in 2008, and has gone from three employees then to almost 20 employees now. What was (as recently as 20 years ago) painstakingly pasted together by hand is now created, laid out, and sent to the printer on computers. Today, we publish The Monadnock Shopper News, an evolution in the name brought about by the realization that to serve our readers best, we needed to provide them with news of immediate and local importance, not just the ads for products and services from local business owners.