AUTHOR Hans Fransen is an interesting man: he emigrated from Holland in 1955, has written several acclaimed books on South African cultural history, and was awarded a knighthood by the queen of the Netherlands.

He is many things, but a writer of coffee-table books in not one of them — as a perusal of the title page will prove, with its subtitle: “A survey of the origin and development of towns, villages and hamlets at the Cape of Good Hope, with particular reference to their physical planning and historical townscape.” It sounds like the subject of a thesis, or at worst a dissertation, and reads like one too. This is no Reader’s Digest volume, full of fascinating side-bars, informative fact boxes and predigested summaries: it is a serious academic study.

With customary hyperbole, the publisher raves about the “rich pictorial component”.

The book is certainly packed with illustrations, but black and white, and of poor quality — adequate for elucidating and expounding on the text, but a far cry from even a nodding acquaintance with the glossy full-colour standards expected of the coffee-table genre.

Enough of what it isn’t: what Old Towns and Villages of the Cape is, is a rich, fascinating and authoritative multidisciplinary study of the original urban origins of white South African settlers and, by extension, the blueprint for all South African towns.

The introduction examines the origins of villages, towns and cities, defining terms and explaining different types of development and why they occur. Various archetypical English and European cities are studied in detail, along with their original plans.

The socioeconomic facets of 18th-century European suburban living are also discussed, and the perennial problem of the two- layered society, consisting of the masters and their servants.

On the whole, the Cape followed established European guidelines and it was only later, with enforced group areas, that the South African cityscape was radically altered.

The book is loosely divided into chapters dealing with varying sorts of urban settlements, so we have Mission Towns, such as Elim and Genadendal; Kerksdorpe, such as Oudtshoorn and Calvinia; together with Towns With a Difference; and the Eastern Cape, where many towns started as military camps.

One of the most fascinating chapters is Some Old Hamlets of the Cape, covering places that do not slot readily into any pigeon hole. Included here is Matjesfontein, “the only (village) in South Africa that owes its existence entirely to the ‘hospitality industry’”, and the World Heritage Site Robben Island.

Robben Island was variously a cattle pen, a post office, a lookout post, a quarry, a whaling station, a lunatic asylum, a leprosarium and, most notoriously, a penal colony. Although there have been many changes over the past 60 years, many of the original 19th-century buildings survive.

With about 1000 pictures, charts, maps and illustrations, the book contains a wealth of information. With a bibliography, a glossary of Afrikaans words, a list of surveyors, and a chart of towns founded before 1900 with a note on their type and morphology, this could be a valuable resource, but for one thing. A reference book is only as good as its index, and this tome may as well be without one: the single page index contains only the names of towns with some page references and, in addition to being inadequate, is not always reliable.

Any serious student is advised to approach the book with a pen and a stack of catalogue cards, and to compile their own index.

Who knows? If you do a good enough job, Jonathan Ball might pay for it to be included in the second edition.

At around R500, the price tag seems hefty, especially as this is no predigested coffee-table ornament, but considering the sheer volume of illustration and research, it is well worth the money and makes an unusual gift for anyone who wants to learn more about the surprisingly fascinating topic of historical townscapes. ( )