The honour citation describes Dr Maslen, of Dunedin, as ''New Zealand's pre-eminent bibliographer'' who had made a ''lifetime contribution to the study of books and their history''.
He was also one of the three main editors of the trail-blazing first major history of publishing in New Zealand: Book and Print in New Zealand: A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa (1997).
A former long-serving staff member in the University of Otago English department, he remains an honorary fellow who is still active in the department's ''scholarly and social life''.
He has received many fellowships and other awards and is a former president and long-standing council member of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand.
Born in Timaru, he later studied at Canterbury University and Oxford University.
His first scholarly publication was ''exactly 60 years ago'', when he had ''sorted out problems'' in first edition printing of a childhood favourite, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
He had since published more than 100 scholarly books and articles, including ''a little biography of the Coull brothers, early Dunedin printers, who lie behind the Whitcoull name'', he said.
This appeared in the Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), a work with articles on every aspect of print culture.
''As if to emphasise that scholars, shut in their own private studies, nevertheless labour in a ghostly company spanning the centuries and the globe, there stands an entry under my own name with the not too subtle warning `1926-','' he said.
From 1961, in order to better to equip himself to study 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 still operates at the university library.
