Nowadays we mostly read on our phones or tablets, and it’s easy to forget the pleasurable visceral experience that you feel upon reading a printed book.

London’s Underground: The Story of the Tube by Oliver Green

This large format book certainly doesn’t disappoint, written in collaboration with London Transport, giving the publishers access to the transport authority’s vast photo library to reproduce dozens of historic photographs and retro posters showing the development of the London Underground. Award-winning photographer Benjamin Graham gives this book its magnificent pictures of the modern Underground.

As a research fellow at the London Transport Museum, Oliver Green demonstrates his detailed knowledge of the subject. Unlike many academics, he can engagingly write about tunnel engineering, graphic design, station architecture and rolling stock design in an accessible style which moves you effortlessly through the history of the Underground.

This excellently designed book makes use of the Johnson typeface (the corporate style of the Underground). For the folios and the break-outs, an adaption of Beck’s coloured map lines is a clever device.

Frank Pick, who did more to unify the Underground to the transport system we’ve inherited today described the Tube as “the framework of the town”, this book brilliantly describes this framework.

Featured image: A 1992 stock London Underground train calls at the Central Line platforms of Oxford Circus tube station by J Cornelius under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.