Simon Loxley’s witty Type: The Secret History of Letters was released in Britain last winter, so it is possible that some clever television exec is already working on an adaptation. No kidding if you caught Michael Wood’s BBC series In Search of Shakespeare on public television, you’ll have an idea what to expect.

Loxley’s itinerary includes Gutenberg’s haunts in Mainz, Germany, a metal type repository at the Type Museum and a modern micro-foundry where everything is computerized. He darts around London streets once named for early type designers William Caslon and his son. Both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were set in a Caslon face, he points out, and Ben Franklin who knew a thing or two about printing was a fan. Loxley also traverses London looking for various incarnations of the London Underground’s famous typeface. Created by Edward Johnston in 1916, touched up in the late 1970s and now licensed for commercial use, the face is one of the earliest examples of corporate identity.

A designer, teacher and typographer, Loxley discusses the nuances of typefaces with aplomb. Indeed, nothing escapes his developed aesthetic: “It costs no more, and takes no more effort, to choose a seat fabric that isn’t visually oppressive,” he writes of a garish bus seat. In the book’s last two chapters one of which is hilariously and ominously titled “Typocalypse” he laments the sometimes detrimental influence of the proliferation of desktop publishing on graphic design.

As with any specialized field, typography is filled with connections between its major players fostered through apprenticeships, bloodthirsty competition, etc. Loxley incorporates mini-bios of these characters (no pun intended) into Type. The result is a funny, informative romp through typography.

Cuba In Mind, edited by Maria Finn Dominguez, is a collection of essays, short fiction, reports and poems by such luminaries as Anthony Trollope, Steven Crane, Graham Greene, Langston Hughes, Elmore Leonard, Oscar Hijuelos and Andrei Codrescu. It is essentially a catchall of impressions by those who have found something to admire in the island and its people. Ernest Hemingway liked the fact that one could raise and fight cocks legally there and shoot live pigeons as a club sport. Allen Ginsberg, who was booted out of the country in 1965, was sympathetic to the Revolution’s basic goals but enraged by its abuse of homosexuals. Reflecting years later on his ill-fated visit, he told a reporter, “Well, the worst thing I said was that I’d heard, by rumor, that Raul Castro [Fidel’s younger brother] was gay. And the second worst thing I said was that Che Guevara was cute.”

G.K. Chesterton once said that the purpose of journalism is to inform the public that Lord Jones is dead, when nobody knew that Lord Jones was alive. The purpose of the Nobel Prize in literature is to inform the public that an author is a great writer, when nobody knew the author existed.

The Nobel news is always electrifying. The laureate’s works are reprinted and resurrected; and his once mundane name assumes a holy aura. Hence The Writer and the World, a new collection of 21 essays, many of them previously published, by 2001 Laureate V.S. Naipaul. A native of Trinidad who has spent most of his life in England, Naipaul excels at finding the universal in the obscure. To study the repercussions of the colonial era, he visits Guyana and Mauritius; peers into Rajasthani politics; analyzes Black Power in Trinidad. To study the fateful marriage between God and greed in America, he wanders through the “Air-Conditioned Bubble” of the 1984 Republican National Convention. And in every instance he applies that “incorruptible scrutiny” for which the Nobel Committee praised him. Naipaul can always be counted on to expose the mimicked thought, the fruitless banality, the emperor’s new clothes.

Two essays stand out. The first, “A Second Visit,” summarizes Naipaul’s notorious contempt for India’s pride in its ancient culture, its spirituality, its self-victimization. The critique rings true, though at times it reeks of an easy Eurocentrism, as if his way is the only way and the whole world should resemble London. In “Our Universal Civilization,” Naipaul argues that the strength of the West lies precisely (and at first glance, paradoxically) in its intellectual “diffidence.” He contrasts the West with Islam, which often rejects Western ideals yet accepts the fruits of Western progress. This theme should be familiar to readers of Naipaul’s two books on Islam, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples. But what is this “universal civilization?” Who belongs to it? Naipaul mentions two of its fundamental precepts: the Golden Rule and the pursuit of happiness. Naipaul refers to the first as a Christian idea, but it was a Confucian idea long before it was Christian. As for the pursuit of happiness, it is arguably the basis of Buddhism. Naipaul is right to say that a new civilization is forming, and he is wise to distinguish it from both the West and the deliciously redundant “globalized world.” But what the future of this civilization is, even wise Naipaul cannot foretell. Kenneth Champeon is a writer who lives in Thailand.

Some of the happiest times in Paul West’s life were spent as a student at Oxford University in the mid-20th century. It was there that he launched his literary career as a poet. Now a prolific and distinguished author, he has published 22 works of fiction and 14 works of nonfiction, including autobiographies and literary criticism. In his new memoir Oxford Days: An Inclination, West describes the famous institution as a "mellifluous beehive, a whirligig of amateur fascinations." Engaging and insightful, the memoir presents a defining period in the author’s life, a time that grew out of his upbringing by a father who was seriously disabled in World War I and an extraordinarily talented mother who taught music. The piano in their home was in use for as much as 10 hours a day, West remembers. His mother had an exquisite knowledge of grammar, and she gave him a grammar book as soon as he could read.

All this was wonderful preparation for the intellectual challenges Oxford would present. West hardly believed his supervisor John Sparrow when the latter described the value and meaning of the Oxford experience. "At Oxford [Sparrow told him] whatever else you think you are doing, you are unwittingly absorbing something unique and choice a sense of the unfailing caliber of mental things, providing you with indestructible inner resources in after-years. He was right," West writes. "Oxford had, still has, a kind of permanent Zeitgeist, indefinable but unmistakable."

While there, along with budding writers Donald Hall, George Steiner and the poet Elizabeth Jannings, West contributed to a poetry collection that was reviewed in glowing terms in the Times Literary Supplement. West gives us a sense of what makes the university distinctive, from its language, to its religious aspects, to its food and smells. His fond tribute to this venerable institution offers abundant riches to the reader.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.