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I'm sitting in the Chelsea hotel reading a book called Whore. I'll admit this sounds cooler than “I'm sitting in a rather expensive Manhattan hotel reading one of the latest poetry collections from the University of Tampa Press.” But after a day of coffee drinking and book shopping in bustling New York, I feel I've earned the right to leave out a few details.

Nothing makes me happier than indulging in the city's literary sensibilities through a holiday book-buying spree, which I'm certain must end at a hotel where your purchases are spread out over the bed and, realizing you're not likely to read them all yourself, you concede to giving a few away as gifts.

With hundreds of bookstores large and small, NYC is unmatched in terms of volume. Many shops are devoted to literary niches — rare Asian books, for example, or comic books, or mystery books (at Murder Ink, get it?). In short, a roving bookworm like me feels right at home in the Big Apple.

My day starts way uptown in Morningside Heights, around the campus of Columbia University, in the spaces between Tom's Restaurant (the Seinfeld coffee shop) and Grant's Tomb (which has, for my money, the city's tightest collection of books about Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant). There are several nice little bookstores in the area, including Morningside Bookshop, which has a good bargain bin, and a nice selection of used and new books with an emphasis on political titles.

My next step is a bookstore that was shown to me by an earnest graduate student years ago, and has since become a favourite.

Labyrinth Books on West 112th Street is a serious, open-floored bookstore which largely features books of some scholarly heft: books with ponderous titles that require colons (i.e. Addressing Gettysburg: How Lincoln's Dyslexia Changed America), the kinds of books that are routinely discussed and advertised in the New York Review of Books. You feel smarter just for being there.

Labyrinth's upstairs, more like a university bookstore, is chock-a-block with serious and academic tomes. This may give a reader two precious feelings: The sense you will be edified on a fascinating topic by an expert; and the satisfying suspicion that “I may be the only person in the history of the world to actually buy this book.”

Before heading off to more lighthearted bookstores, there are plenty of coffee shops in the area to fortify you for your next stop. For those who want to indulge in the spirit of NYC intellectual life, there are plenty of boho cafés in the area; for those who simply want to indulge in bad Seinfeld impressions, Tom's Restaurant is not exactly a culinary hot spot, but it does serve an outstanding coffee-flavoured milkshake.

Of course, bookselling in New York, as in other metropolises, has been significantly altered by the dominance of large retailers. Gone are some of the old go-to Midtown stores like Coliseum Books and Brentano's.

Although I am philosophically disposed to prefer cozy walk-up bookstores, whose shelves are not all bright yellow from the For Dummies series, I really have nothing against the big retailers. The multi-storey Barnes & Noble at Union Square is still a favourite (I recommend it to anyone who wants to get something for everybody in one stop), but big or small, I do insist that all bookstores worth visiting must smell good. The potential for a moldy, newsprinty smell is so strong in a bookstore, you really have to appreciate those toasty places that somehow smell like a bakery at Christmastime.

Right across the street from lower Midtown's City Bakery (the Sex and the City coffee shop) is the kids' bookstore, Books of Wonder. In addition to books for those who need to be read to, Books of Wonder has an extensive selection of young-adult titles and a wonderfully engaged and helpful staff who can help you choose if you don't know your Fur Family from your Berenstain Bears.

The bookstore is adjoined to the popular and relatively new Cupcake Café — which serves the best coffee cake I've ever eaten.

Even if kids' books are not your thing, you could still buy a festive edition of Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales and take it with you in the evening to the White Horse Tavern, the Greenwich Village spot where Thomas drank himself to death in 1952.

In Little Italy, the Canadian bookstore chain McNally Robinson opened up a very nice and modern two-floor franchise just two years ago. When I was there, I found a small and tasteful display of Canadian books in the basement, and this seemed perfect for all those who've always wanted to read a book by a Canadian, but wanted to wait until they could pay Manhattan prices. In the East Village, St. Mark's Bookshop is a delightful shop, and has the best selection possible for lovers of poetry. It was there that I purchased Sarah Maclay's collection, Whore, and a new favourite, Kathleen Flenniken's collection Famous.

My final stop was the secondhand, downtown hub The Strand. At some point every book lover should make it to The Strand, if only in the hopes of finding some out-of-print gem. Though I imagine the need for this kind of shopping has been significantly altered with the advent of e-shopping, it's nice to be among the harried students and night owls considering books that one would ordinarily pass on. Nowadays, I too often pass up on buying some books with the thought “I'll just order it on-line” — this phrase being the book-buyer's equivalent of “I'll wait for the DVD.”

While considering some novelization of the Scooby-Doo movies, way up on one of the shelves I actually saw a copy of a book I wrote 10 years ago. I had to scale one of those library ladders just to check it out — I mean, to make sure it was not a copy I had once lovingly inscribed (i.e. “To my best friend, K.C. — you're a superstar”). Anyways, the book was clean, and I scaled down and did what all contented people at The Strand do: I bought a tote bag and called it a night.

I arranged my day's purchases on my hotel bed, proud of my selections, ready for Christmas. Getting around to reading any of them, that's another story.

Montreal's David McGimpsey is the author of three poetry collections and Certifiable, a book of short stories.