But there’s one kind of publication Kindle and company rarely do justice to: the “art book”. Whether it’s a coffee-table exhibition catalogue, an artist’s portfolio or a text- and image-rich art history, the art book needs to be handled, fondled and otherwise physically browsed, perused, paged through, scanned or mulled over. Often the choice of packaging, binding, paper and printing technique is as much a part of the reading experience as the content and layout of the book.

Debates rage around publishers’ survival strategies in a world of constantly changing types and levels of literacy. South Africa has a particularly curious mixture of readers (potential and actual) with divergent means and preferences; for now, the printed word is still able to vie with the electronic word. Local publishers have tried to win customers through sexed-up genre fiction (bulky “airport thrillers” and “beach reads”), SMS novels for teens, books with multimedia tie-ins and various other initiatives. Critics have pointed out that sloppy editing practices have crept in as books have been rushed to print.

Art books, on the other hand, are promoted according to a distinct model. They are niche publications, often produced in limited editions and typically quite expensive: their publishers target buyers who value books as objects or as works of art in themselves. While there may be cause to fret about the future of publishing, digital or otherwise, an encounter with a high-quality South African art book (and there are many of them) is likely to leave the reader feeling more than sanguine.

Early in 2011, around the same time that TJ/Double Negative – a remarkable collaboration between photographer David Goldblatt and novelist Ivan Vladislavic – won the prestigious Kraszna-Krausz award, FourthWall Books published Fire Walker, a striking collection of images and essays relating to the now-iconic Johannesburg sculpture by William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx. Then, towards the end of last year, Wits University Press launched the four-volume Visual Century: South African Art in Context.

Each of these publications is significant in its own way. While the former two are idiosyncratic commentaries on specific works, the latter is a compendious survey. A book such as Fire Walker can pay attention to the minute details of artistic conception and execution; its editors and contributors engage variously (and in various modes or formats – by turns textual and visual, “academic” and “creative”) with the sculpture alone, with comparable public artworks, or with directly related aspects of city space and urban planning. The many participants in the Visual Century project, under the guidance of director Gavin Jantjes, have tackled a different task.

While the four volumes are not reference books per se, they do offer an overview of South African art (from 1907-2007). This is huge terrain to cover and the authors do so admirably, presenting art and artists not simply within set periods but also through key themes. Nonetheless, like most expansive art history endeavors it cannot afford the luxury of particularity: artist biographies, the nuances of method, questions of form and even, to an extent, formal analysis are all secondary concerns. Instead, the imperative driving Visual Century – as indicated in the subtitle – is “context”, which in this case means national (and sometimes international) socio-political context.

In his general introduction, Jantjes writes of the history of South Africa’s art as “a river … growing in stature as it glides towards the estuary of the present. It connects to the history of the world’s art just as rivers inevitably connect to the great oceans of our planet.” This analogy is a useful one as it allows for the likelihood that the process of navigating and mapping our country’s art history will neglect some minor tributaries and, ultimately, will be unable to trace the major waterways to their sources.

Nonetheless, although he emphasises that “there are plural narratives of art history” and that “all history remains incomplete”, Jantjes does delimit the Visual Century project within the confines of the nation and national culture. According to this logic, those artists who rejected the politics of the national – who did not wish to see their art as articulating “moments in the life of a nation” – could not and did not “become actors in the making of history”. There is a teleological bent to any construction of South African history according to “the politics of national liberation”: as Jantjes affirms, artists who held “a critical light up to their nation’s moral potential” created works that are now “testimony to historical progress”.

The multiple perspectives offered by the contributors to Visual Century (and by many of the works of art reproduced on its pages) do, however, unsettle this framework. Moreover, the series presents many examples of artists who were not defined by their “context” and whose work disrupts the standard black/white narratives. In Volume One, which covers the years 1907-1948 – from the post-war détente between Briton and Boer to the National Party election victory that ushered in apartheid – this occurs, for instance, in intriguing visual pairings such as the twin landscapes by Moses Tladi and Gregoire Boonzaier.

Volume Four, which covers the transition to democracy and beyond (1990-2007), carries a foreword by Sarat Maharaj that complicates claims about “South Africa-in-the-world”, reminding readers (notwithstanding the country’s isolation for so many years) of the “runaway translation, cultural swap, pidginisation” and “dirty cosmopolitanism” that has long defined this part of the globe. In the same volume, however, Jantjes rightly exposes the “masks and myths of globalism”; his perspective as an inside-outsider (he has been based in Europe for over three decades) is valuable in this regard.

This is, then, a polyvocal history. It was evident at the launch events in Johannesburg and Cape Town last year that there is a healthy disagreement between contributors to Visual Century on how to approach race, medium, ideology and any number of contentious issues that arise in writing about art in/and South Africa. The series manages to be both comprehensive and contradictory, and the editors (Jillian Carman, Lize van Robbroeck, Mario Pissarra, Thembinkosi Goniwe and Mandisi Majavu) have corralled diverse opinions within its four volumes.

Detailed, dense and beautifully presented, Visual Century is more than an account of the material circumstances under which our artists have worked over the last hundred years. In its own appealing materiality, it makes a significant contribution both to South African art history and to the value of the book in this country.

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My gracious editor at Business Day, Katy Chance, was rather taken by the idea of bookshelf porn but had to cut this reference from the main article owing to space constraints in the print edition. So she asked me to add a “sidebar” ... and this little meditation is the result (with apologies for the odd bit of repetition):

Are you into bookshelf porn? If so, don’t be shy. There are lots of people like you out there – hoarding books of every shape and size, then getting cheap thrills out of stacking them in inventive, sexy, impress-your-dinner-guests ways. Some of them submit photos to www.bookshelfporn.com (yes, it’s an actual website).

Yet even the most shameless bibliophile or bookshelf voyeur has to admit that there’s also something quite sexy about a Kindle. And there’s a lot to be said for the convenience of a readily searchable, easily portable, personal e-library. So, apart from the home décor advantages, is it still possible to defend old-school books?

First, let’s dispense with the environmental argument. Do printers “kill trees” to make paper books? Well, technically, yes – but those trees are specially grown for the purpose in huge, carefully-managed forests. The Sappis of this world actually claim that they are performing an ecological good by planting ‘renewable’ carbon-guzzling vegetation. Okay, that might be pushing it, but the point is: the scrapyards where computers and gadgets go to die (most of them in third-world countries) aren’t exactly eco-friendly either.

Assuming there’s no ethical issue at stake, what about finance? E-books are undoubtedly cheaper – and often free – but the outlay for an e-reader is still prohibitive to many, particularly in a country like South Africa. Moreover, our government could make printed books much more affordable with a few sensible tax reforms.

The real financial hit in our electronic age, however, is felt not by consumers but by the producers: authors and publishers. Ewan Morrison, a British author and one of the most vocal doomsayers declaring the imminent “death of the book” as we know it, suggests that a wholesale shift to e-books will effectively make it impossible for writers to earn a living wage from their work. The self-publishing “bubble”, Morrison predicts, will also kill off publishers – who, despite their many flaws, do at least perform a minimal kind of ‘quality control’.

If all this is inevitable (and there are many who, challenging Morrison’s model, argue that it is not) then what else will we lose? American writer Jonathan Franzen recently went so far as to suggest that e-books are “corroding values”: not only is the “permanence” of printed books “reassuring” to individuals when “everything else in life is fluid”, but in a broader sense the “radical contingency” of text seen only on a screen is “not compatible” with the principles on which “justice and responsible self-government” are based.

Again, Franzen may be overstating the case. But it is true that certain kinds of reading (and re-reading) experiences are only possible in a world of printed books. Ever visited a bookstore or library in search of a particular book, only to find yourself more interested in the titles shelved on either side? That kind of serendipity is impossible with Amazon’s automated “If you like this book, you may also like...” recommendations.

Finally, there’s the book-as-totem. Cherishing the relationship you’ve built with a particular copy of a book is more than nostalgia; it’s part of your identity. The different textures and smells of volumes old and new add richness to the sense data of reading. Marginal scribbles become messages sent to your future self, or to other future readers.

Making human contact – that’s something e-readers can’t do.