PURPOSE: To prevent the collating mistakes by carrying out the mechanical collation of lottery numbers between a printed book and an allocation list.

CONSTITUTION: A printed book 14 is fixed on a table at a prescribed position and the OCR numbers of the corresponding allocation list 42 are read into a controller 28 via an OCR hand reader 38. The lottery numbers to be collated in response to said OCR numbers and the positions of the lottery numbers are successively read out of a floppy disk device 36 via a memory circuit. Then a transport device 16 moves an optical reading device 26 to a prescribed position on the table based on the data showing the position of the book 14 where the lottery numbers, etc., are printed. Thus the characters, i.e., the lottery numbers, etc., of the book 14 are read and compared with the data on the lottery numbers, etc., already read out via a comparator contained in the controller 28. In such a constitution, the collating mistakes can be avoided.