Last July, I was invited with a group of American Fulbright students to a reception at Glasgow City Chambers.

I remember little of the speeches, but I will never forget the look on the Fulbrighters' faces as they were led into the building and up its splendidly ornate marble staircase, beneath arches and domes worthy of the Vatican, though possibly a touch more opulent. These youngsters are among the most sophisticated in the American university system, yet jaws dropped at the sight of what is surely one of the most glorious public interiors in Europe.

Who couldn't be impressed by the Venetian magnificence of William Young's wildly triumphal creation? Yet as every savvy Glaswegian knows, this spectacular building is only one of hundreds of show-stopping pieces in a city with more than its fair share of architectural masterpieces. This simple fact is celebrated in a delightful new book, Glorious Glasgow, written by James McCarroll, with over 600 photographs by Duncan I McEwan (Fort, £25).

Putting aside my regret that McEwan cropped his image of the old County Buildings ten feet shy of my own windows, this is one of the most absorbing coffee table books imaginable. Starting at the centre of the city, it spreads to all points of the compass, and in so doing makes one feel fresh pride in the imaginative genius this city has inspired from architects down the ages.

If your interest is literary, then the City Chambers is a good pace to begin, looking out as it does on the first monument erected to Sir Walter Scott, who towers over George Square holding pen and book. The world-famous Mitchell Library is given full honours, of course, as is the melancholy reminder of Charles Rennie Macintosh's well-scuffed, exquisite library in Glasgow School of Art.

One bookish haven I did not know, but intend to seek out, is described by McCarroll as "quite simply, one of the most elegant spaces in Glasgow", namely the Library in the Royal Faculty of Procurators, in Nelson Mandela Place. To an eye raised on the east coast, Charles Wilson's design has more than a little in common with the Faculty of Advocates' Library in Edinburgh's Parliament Square, albeit more robust and reader-friendly.

New arrivals to the city are usually struck by its Victorian swagger, but this book covers everything between the medieval and the contemporary, from the commoners' well in Ladywell Street, to George Wyllie's giant safety pin honouring motherhood in the grounds of Strathclyde University.

Other edifices are equally cheering. Looking at the facade, for instance, of the Hatrack Building in St Vincent's Street, you can't help but marvel at the chutzpah of architects who set themselves the challenge of creating a 10-storey building on a plot less than 30 feet wide. The result is like a generous slice of thickly iced chocolate cake, of the sort once found in Mrs Cranston's Tearooms, just up the street. This and countless other art deco or northern renaissance exteriors rival the feted postcard trophies of Barcelona and other much vaunted tourist attractions, threatening to cast Gaudi and Miralles into the shade.

Even the most jaded will surely come away from these pages with new respect for this remarkably beautiful place.

This book is also full of stories. Put it into the hands of a novelist bereft of ideas, and their agent will have a synopsis by the weekend. Take The Lady Artists' Club at 5 Blythswood Square, whose door is designed by Charles Rennie McIntosh. McCarroll informs us that the house next to it, No 7, was the residence of the infamous Madeleine Smith, who allegedly poisoned her lover. It is not the well-known Smith scandal that interests me, however, but the thought of the women in the artists' club, and the sorts of lives they must have lived. They would have been very different, one suspects, from those of the predominantly male architects immortalised on Glasgow's streets - but that's another story.