“…Kroch’s gave me a good bargain and sent down between three hundred and four hundred books…on the most varied subjects. Carefully…I classified them and zilched them.”
Life plus 99 Years (1958), Nathan F. Leopold, Jr.
I supposed “zilched” in this case means “processed” or “readied” or whatever, but does anyone else have a guess?
Moved Cafe Society --> MPSIMS.
The OED does not seem to know of any such usage. It does show a verbal usage of “zilch”, but that is in a sporting context: “To prevent (the opposition) from scoring; to defeat.”
I wonder if it could mean “I zeroed them”, with zeroed perhaps meaning something like “marked them in the records as having been borrowed zero times, as yet”. Just a WAG.
As a sarcastic librarian, who sees donations all the time of the most useless varieties, I immediately jump to the ironic interpretation:
“This company sent me a freaking cartload of worthless shit. I did my diligence, checked that they were actually worthless shit, and after confirmation, dumped them all.”
Otherwise, the above interpretations of marking them as zero circulations seems logical, except that physical card catalog records generally worked on the assumption that a new item started at zero, and so it wouldn’t expressly need to be marked.
The three examples in the current online OED are–
In case anyone didn’t recognize the name, it’s Nathan Leopold of “Leopold and Loeb.” Also, the book was co-written by “Perry Mason” creator Erle Stanley Gardner.
It’s not obvious what it means. Kroch’s was a Chicago bookstore, which later merged with Brentanos. It sounds like he’s saying that he got a bunch of books and read them all, although how that ties in with ‘zilched’ is the puzzle. Maybe he means that there were none left unread after he had finished.