After reaching a peak in 2014, sales of e-readers and ebooks have slowed and hardback sales have surged. The latest figures from the Publishing Association showed ebook sales falling 17% in 2016, with an 8% rise in their physical counterparts. At the same time, publishers’ production values have soared and bookshops have begun to fill up with books with covers of jewel-like beauty, often with gorgeously textured pages.

Books have always had a fetishistic quality to them, with their dusty secretiveness. Now, though, it feels like we’re living through a special moment in the history of book design and beautiful books are everywhere.

Take George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo with its marmoreal endpapers or Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads, with its cover inspired by mosaic from the Imam mosque at Isfahan; Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, its sumptuous jacket inspired by the tiles of William Morris; 4th Estate’s gorgeous repackaging of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s backlist, based on vibrant African headwrap patterns; the glimmering Penguin Hardcover Classics reissue of the works of F Scott Fitzgerald, or its clothbound editions of Austen, Brontë and Dickens. It’s hard to know whether to read these books or caress them.

But after reaching a peak in 2014, sales of e-readers and ebooks have slowed and hardback sales have surged. The latest figures from the Publishing Association showed ebook sales falling 17% in 2016, with an 8% rise in their physical counterparts. At the same time, publishers’ production values have soared and bookshops have begun to fill up with books with covers of jewel-like beauty, often with gorgeously textured pages. As the great American cover designer Peter Mendelsund put it to me, books have “more cloth, more foil, more embossing, page staining, sewn bindings, deckled edges”.

I spoke to Christopher de Hamel, the author of a very beautiful book, Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts, who compared the current state of publishing to the situation at the end of the 15th century, when the printing press arrived and changed the world of books forever. “The manuscript makers suddenly felt threatened by printers,” he said. “They started very deliberately doing things in their manuscripts that they knew the printers couldn’t do. They did clever borders that looked as though real insects had landed on the page. They started doing extraordinary trompe l’oeil illusions; they really brought colour back into their manuscripts because they knew that printers couldn’t do that. It was the world of technology and the handmade struggling against each other, each striving to do things that the other couldn’t match.” We know how this one ends (although de Hamel points out that there’s still a thriving community of 21st-century hand illuminators). But today’s publishers and booksellers are optimistic that history will not repeat itself.

James Daunt, chief executive of Waterstones, contends that the resurgence of the physical book is real and sustainable. Furthermore, a focus on the book as object of desire has been central to his turnaround of Waterstones. This has not only seen the firm return to profit, but has made the shops, once dim grey halls of cheap paperbacks, ziggurats of three for twos and mountains of celebrity cookbooks, things of beauty in themselves, as cleverly curated and carefully atmospheric as Daunt’s eponymous London bookshops. “A very large part of the way I sell books has been about how you present them, how you bring the customer to them and exploit the tactile sense of a physical book. We’ve changed the furniture at Waterstones to make that happen. We have smaller tables with more focused displays. Everything is aimed at persuading people to pick things up, trying to catch their eye, making bookshops a place where you discover beautiful things.”

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