Considering that it's an environment where people tend to keep themselves to themselves, an awful lot of folk have got very good, very human stories about the London underground. I'm a country bumpkin, who visits London no more than once a month or so nowadays, but even I've got a couple – about two drunk old Italian men trying to sell me an onion, and a tube driver-turned-movie voiceover trailer guy. The forager and nature writer Richard Mabey might also not be a writer people would assume would have an affinity with the tube, but A Good Parcel Of English Soil, his essay on the Metropolitan line, is one of the most compelling segments of Penguin's Underground Lines Box Set, published to celebrate a century and a half of the tube.

Mabey's contribution demonstrates just how eclectic and broad-minded the editors at Penguin have been in compiling this beautifully designed package of 12 books, each about or themed around one of the underground lines. Mabey's elegantly written paean to the Metroland that the oldest underground line gave way to – "a fairytale Avalon that could be reached by the modern magic carpet of an electric railway" – is a lesson in just how rural some not so out-of-the-way stops on the tube were during its early years, and how phenomenally forward-thinking its Victorian creators were. At the other end of the spectrum are The Blue Riband by former Sloane Ranger Peter York – self-described "Marie Antoinette of the underground" – and a collection of pieces about east London put together by Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom, the editors of the high end men's fashion magazine Fantastic Man (the one time I think the set strays a bit too far from its subterranean subject).

Underground Lines often matches its writers to its tracks very well, in terms of temperament as well as personal history. The Jubilee line, so often associated with capitalism and the Docklands development, is a good match for John O'Farrell, a writer whose wit was marinated in the political 1980s. The nervy prose of William Leith could not be more apt for the rather fraught Northern line, and his manic, anxious account of being evacuated from a train that was filling with smoke is probably the most addictively readable thing here. "People never tell you to have a pleasant journey on the underground, just as people will say, 'Enjoy your meal,' but never 'Enjoy your cigarette,'" he writes.

Perhaps best of all, however, is John Lanchester's illuminating What We Talk About When We Talk About The Tube, which gets the balance between humour and history lesson just right, and made me feel a new fondness for the somewhat creaky and unreliable District line. Lanchester covers a huge amount of ground in fewer than 100 pages, debunking popular beliefs about Harry Beck's map ("The map created the city," he argues, whereas many of us often assume the opposite) and exactly how much of the underground really is underground ("Only 45% of the whole network runs through tunnels"), while analysing its contribution to London's "hedonic treadmill" of perceived happiness. He queries the scant use of the tube in films (he overlooks Christopher's Smith's excellent 2004 horror film Creep in this lament), rides in the driver's compartment of a train, and learns a few facts that probably won't help the tube-phobic to conquer their fear (if you are evacuated from a train in a tunnel, you have to leave from the front, not the side, owing to space restrictions). Lanchester gives himself only four out of 10 for tube geekiness, which is either a gesture of extreme modesty or a measure of just how obsessively some folks out there will delve into the inner workings of the underground. On reflection, though, I'm glad that it's people like him writing about it here, not people like them.