Here's a few well-chosen authors' words for openers bob greene's column:tribune media services -- charleston times-courier --- sat - june 1st, 1996

"At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed on Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the patent office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk." Those are the opening words of John Hersey's 1948 book "Hiroshima."

The opening words of books - the first passages, which set the books' tone - are toiled and worried over by the authors.

The choices authors make in crafting those first words are fascinating and thought-provoking - and something of an endangered species in this emerging new era in which the first things people usually write are their log-on initials and passwords.

A fellow named David Spector has collected some opening passages from books in a book of his own, which he titled "Call Me Ishmael." Today, with thanks to Mr. Stector, some of those openings:

"Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men and found themselves with less in common than they had believed they had." - James Hilton, "Lost Horizon" (1933).

"I have been young and now am old." - James Gould-Cozzens, -'Morning, Noon, and Night" (1968).

"After the end of the World War of 1914 there was a deep conviction and almost universal hope that peace would reign in the world." - Winston S. Churchill, "The Gathering Storm" (1948).

"Gil and I crossed the eastern divide about two by the sun." - Walter Van Tilburg Clark, "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1940).

'When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the bar-racks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh." - James Jones, "From Here to Eternity" (1951).

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there L.P. Hartley, "The Go-Between," (1953).

"Once in a long while, as a great treat, Father took me down to his office. Clarence Day, 'Life With Father? (1935).

"Roy Hobbs pawed at the glass before thinking to prick a match with his thumbnail and hold the spurting flame in his cupped palm close to the lower berth window, but by then he had figured it was a tunnel they were passing through and was no longer surprised at the bright sight of himself holding a yellow light over his head, peering back in." - Bernard Malamud, "The Natural" (1952).

"On a bright December morning long ago, two thinly clad children were kneeling upon the bank of a frozen canal in Holland." - Mary Mapes Dodge, "Hans Brinker, or, The Silver Skates" (1865).

"I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their - neighborhoods." - Truman Capote, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1958).

"The first time I saw him he couldn't have been much more than sixteen years old, a little ferret of a kid, sharp and quick."-Budd Schulberg, "What Makes Sammy Run?' (1941).

"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up." - Jack Kerouac, "On the Road" (1957).

"Kit didn't speak much or often of her father." - Sherwood Anderson, "Kit Brandon" (1936).

"Some notable sight was drawing the passengers, both men and women, to the window; and therefore I rose and the car to see what it was." - Owen Wister, "The Virginian" (1902).

"Friend Al: Well, Al old pal I suppose you seen in the paper where I been sold to the White Sox." - Ring Lardner, "You Know Me Al" (1914).

"I went back to Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before." -John Knowles, "A Separate Peace" (1959).

"Right at midnight last night, just as I was kissing Candy Grossman, something popped into my mind ..."

Wait a minute. That one wasn't in the collection. I don't know where that one came from.

In any event - David Spector, in addition to compiling great opening passages in his collection, also compiled great endings - the last words of books, which are chosen with just as much care by authors as are first words. I'll consider presenting some of those here one, of these days, but only if you ask nicely. - -'

6/1st/96