A leading international expert in print culture, Dr Keith Maslen (84), is delighted to acquire the ONZM honour.
The honour citation describes Dr Maslen, of Dunedin, as ''New Zealand's pre-eminent bibliographer'' who experienced created a ''lifetime contribution for the research of books and their history''.
He was also one of the three principal editors of the trail-blazing first major history of publishing in New Zealand: publication and Print in New Zealand: A information to Print Culture in Aotearoa (1997).
A past long-serving staff customer in the college of Otago English department, he remains an honorary fellow who's nevertheless active in the department's ''scholarly and interpersonal life''.
He has obtained many fellowships and other awards and is mainly a past president and long-standing council customer of the Bibliographical culture of Australia and New Zealand.
Born in Timaru, he later studied at Canterbury college and Oxford University.
His first scholarly publication was ''exactly sixty years ago'', when he experienced ''sorted out problems'' in first edition printing of the childhood favourite, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
He experienced since released a lot more than one hundred scholarly books and articles, which include ''a little biography of the Coull brothers, early Dunedin printers, who lie behind the Whitcoull name'', he said.
This appeared in the Oxford Companion for the publication (2010), a work with content articles on every element of print culture.
''As if to emphasise that scholars, shut in their own private studies, however labour in a ghostly company spanning the centuries and the globe, there stands an entry below my own name with the not as well subtle warning `1926-','' he said.
From 1961, in order to better to equip himself to research printing and publishing in the hand-press era - from about 1450-1850 and beyond - he ran a printing workshop and museum called the Bibliography Room.
Now renamed the Otakou Press, this nevertheless functions on the college library.
(From:printing china)
