100 Best First Lines of Novels

I'll give you the first 100, without comment. From infoplease:

1.Call me Ishmael.Herman MelvilleMoby-Dick1851
2.It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.Jane AustenPride and Prejudice1813
3.A screaming comes across the sky.Thomas PynchonGravity's Rainbow1973
4.Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Gregory Rabassa)One Hundred Years of Solitude1967
5.Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.Vladimir NabokovLolita1955
6.Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.Leo Tolstoy (trans. Constance Garnett)Anna Karenina1877
7.riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.James JoyceFinnegans Wake1939
8.It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.George Orwell19841949
9.It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.Charles DickensA Tale of Two Cities1859
10.I am an invisible man.Ralph EllisonInvisible Man1952

Homebase 3 from Abebooks - It's Here!

From abebooks.com:

New Features

  • Real time inventory management: HomeBase 3.0 will automatically send listings and wants to Abebooks as they’re entered or edited with no need to e-mail or FTP files. The FTP option will be retained to accommodate users who don’t want to be online when they work. You may still export a listings or wants file and e-mail it as an attachment via your e-mail program if they choose.
  • Multi-select: Up to 100 listings or wants may be selected and edited/deleted at once. For example, if you realized you mis-typed an author's name on 5 listings, you could select them all and make the update once, and the edit would be applied to all 5 listings.
  • Improved Price Partner: Price Partner is built into HomeBase 3. Booksellers may select a sub-set of their listings and increase or decrease prices by a fixed amount or a percentage on only the selected listings. They can also update all selected listings to the same price.
  • ISBN LookUp: ISBN LookUp will now return more than one result if we have several matches to the ISBN in our database. The bookseller can choose the best match from the list. In addition, many more fields may be returned by ISBN LookUp.
  • Quantity: If you have more than one copy of a book, you can use the quantity field and we'll automatically decrement the quantity online when a book is sold; no more manually re-listing!
  • More Import Options: HomeBase 3.0 can import almost any type of file, so getting set up is easy.


I like the improved import/export features so far, but I am a little put off by the automatic updates to the website. For those of us who list on several websites, this can create a problem. I will be doing a full review of the software once I've had enough time to use all of its new features.