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When Maslen returned to Otago from sabbatical in 1967, he was determined to put the operation of the Press on sounder ground. He drew up the ‘Chapel Rules’, which were given to each user for signing. He started a register that logged in users and visitors to the press, and in order to document the activities of the press, instigated the policy of taking two copies of every item printed. This was the beginning of the Bibliography Room Archive, now a collection filling ten boxes. No matter how skilled one was in the ‘Black Art’, there remains one golden rule: ‘type comes in fonts and lives in cases. It needs your help to go home.’ Two versions of the ‘Chapel Rules’ are on display alongside a photograph of authors Maurice Shadbolt and Elspeth Sandys (the 1996 Burns Fellow), seen admiring some of outputs from the Press.
‘Chapel Rules’, Department of English: Press Room, c. 1967. Typescript