Newspaper Article – Thousands of books but she’s too busy to read

Thousands of books but she’s too busy to read

She thumbs through thousands of books a year yet rarely reads a word – and this has gone on for more than a decade.

To Mrs Dorothy Marriott, Tamatea, it is all in a day’s work as she updates copies of New Zealand’s statutes and regulations in the Napier Society library, legal offices, local authority libraries, accountants’ offices and some private companies in Napier and Hastings.

Mrs Marriott cancels sections of Acts and regulations which have been changed or superceded. She sometimes cancels whole volumes dating back to 1908 and sometimes pastes-in insets and instructions.

Known officially as an annotator, Mrs Marriott works for a company of legal annotators and law book sellers, Brooker and Friend, who have corrected and sold legal reference books in New Zealand since 1912.

No time

“Although I have been doing this work since 1969 I know no more about the law than I did then. I just don’t have time to read the volumes as I correct them,” Mrs Marriott said.

Each day of her working week, Mrs Marriott sets off with bundles of slips of paper which she must paste in the correct volume, on the correct page and over the correct section.

She works at a remarkable speed holding pens and paste brush in one hand as she flicks the pages with the other.

“It takes me almost the whole year to cover my territory which includes all of Napier and Hastings.

Early days

“When I first started I did look at some of the statues I was updating. Quite often I thought ‘goodness, is there even a law to cover this or that’ ..

“But now I hardly see a word. Just the conglomeration of letters and numbers in the section I am working on.
“In some years there are only two volumes of the statues published but in others there are up to six. It takes about a week to update each office library.

“Like just about everything these days I have to cope with delays. The statutes and regulations for 1979 have still not been printed” she said.

“In cases like this, legal offices and others using the statutes have to use advance leaflets of the new Acts and just wait hopefully for the completed volumes to come off the press.”

Photo caption – WHEN Dorothy Marriott attacks a good book she does it with pens, scissors and a glue pot.