Curt Zoller, A Churchill Bibliographer of Distinction
R.I.P. Curt
Laguna Hills, Calif., October 6th— Curt Zoller, a Churchill scholar for a third of a century, passed away a week short of his 94th birthday. “Over the last two years his health had been rapidly declining,” writes his daughter Marsha, “but he tried so hard to ‘Never give in.'”
A serious book collector, Curt was a longtime columnist for Finest Hour, the Churchill quarterly I edited from 1982 to 2014. There he wrote “Churchilltrivia,” the Quiz column. In 2004 he published an invaluable reference, The Annotated Bibliography of Works About Sir Winston S. Churchill. In it, Curt logged thousands of books, articles and dissertations. I contributed annotations describing the primary works. In his review, Christopher Sterling wrote:
Zoller divides his more than 2,500 citations into six sections, each of which is arranged and numbered in chronological order. Section A focuses on books devoted entirely to some aspect of Churchill’s life (684 of them); Section B concerns “books containing substantial data about Winston S. Churchill” (more than 900); Section C covers articles and lecture series (nearly 650); Section D provides a handy list of reviews of Churchill’s own books; and Section E offers a three-page alphabetical listing by author of sixty theses and dissertations about Churchill (largely from American universities, but including some in other languages from other nations), the earliest dating from the 1940s. This is all held together with a solid index of author names and an index of titles, allowing users a variety of ways to accessing the material.
Other Zoller Works
Curt Zoller also published Herschel Logan’s The American Handpress: Its Origin, Development and Use (1980), and co-authored, with Michael McMenamin, an important book on Bourke Cockran: Becoming Winston Churchill: The Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor (2007). In his review of the latter, Ted Hutchinson wrote:
There is some rare stuff between the covers of Becoming Winston Churchill: material so unusual, so uncommon, that Churchillians should treasure it like a rare gem, or a first edition of Mr. Brodrick’s Army. The book is perhaps even more uncommon than such rarities. It exists in a world of fakes, largely populated by books which only pretend to do what it does.
A man never dies as long as he is remembered. Curt’s friends will remember the delight of his company and friendship; his books assure him a permanent memorial among Churchill scholars.
