Telephone: 07- 3202 7547       ABN 29904145596       E-mail: books@iinet.net.au

BookSplendour is an online bookstore......and a family business, which is being operated by three persons and several other highly important creatures. We have been registered since 2002. With more than 22,000 books listed on the net (and many more in stock), we currently are the largest online sellers of used books in Queensland and one of the largest in Australia. New listings are being added daily.

We offer personal service by the proprietors. We will promptly answer your inquiries and, if required, will send you digital images of the books. We normally dispatch all orders on the same day or on the next working day, and we use high quality packaging materials, to ensure that the books are adequately protected while in transit.

The books that we advertise for sale are all in our possession, sitting on shelves in our store. This means that if you decide to purchase any, you can do so immediately, over the phone, with credit card payments processed while you wait. Or you can fill in the details on the safe server and order online. We accept Mastercard, Visa, and American Express. Other available methods of payment  include PayPal, direct deposit, cheque or money order. However, due to the relatively high fees that most banks charge for converting foreign currencies, cheques and money orders can normally be accepted in the Australian dollars only. For public libraries, educational bodies and other Government departments, pro-forma invoicing is available. Here are our postage charges:

We are in Pullenvale, a western suburb of  Brisbane, the capitol of Queensland, on the eastern coast of Australia. If you have not heard of  Australia, this is where you can find it. Near the top of the world, slightly below and to the right of New Zealand.

Customers who live locally sometimes ask us if they could come and browse through our stock, pick up their books. Here we have to stress that we are only registered as an online bookstore, that we do not carry the type of insurance brick and mortar stores normally have, and therefore only in exceptional circumstances we can allow people to come to us as private visitors. Also, as an online bookshop we do not arrange our books by subjects, only by inventory numbers. Searching or browsing therefore is much easier online - you can then e-mail us to let us know of your selection. You can also ring us on 07-3202 7547 between 9AM and 7PM, and give us the details, ask questions. We would be able to almost instantaneously confirm a book's' availability and describe its condition to you. If required we can also email you scans or pictures of our books.

The books that have been sold are deleted immediately, but some search engines, particularly Google, might still show them as being "for sale" on their cached pages for some (often considerable) time. You might thus be lead to a book, only to find out that it is no longer available. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about this, except to apologise and hope that in future such problems would be overcome.

We maintain a large inventory of books on a range of subjects, Australian fiction and non-fiction being our main specialty. We also specialise in New Age and esoteric books, self-help & personal growth, alternative lifestyle and medicine, business, religion, history, biography. Beside this, we always maintain a large stock of British/American Fiction & Nonfiction as well as of some Non-English Literature and translations. 

BookSplendour Online Art Gallery

Tide at Byron Bay  Go to the gallery of original Australian landscape paintings

Seascape 2 by Voyen Koreis Go to the gallery of modern and abstract paintings

Go to the gallery of images of Old and Modern Masters of art

Booksplendour Blog on Books, Arts

Having had his application to study at the Prague Academy of Arts rejected, the Czech born Mucha journeyed to Vienna, where he attended an evening class in drawing, and later to Munich, where between 1885 - 87 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. He moved to Paris in the late 1880s. When in 1890 he held his first Paris one-man show, he was able to display well over 400 works. For a while in Paris Mucha shared a studio with another of our favourite painters, Paul Gauguine. Though the two artists had a great deal in common (for instance the desire to explore some of the darker corners of human psyche through attending spiritualistic séances), it very soon became obvious that Mucha’s art was going to develop quite differently to that of his older companion. While Paris was at the grip of Impressionism and the budding Expressionism, Mucha remained oblivious to such potential influences, as he obviously always saw himself more a designer rather than artist of the avant guard. Viewed from the distance of more than a century, in many ways his art was perhaps even more innovative. Mucha's originality lies in the way he was able to marry the ornamental design, such as can be seen on many works of art from the antiquity to the present times, and occurring in many parts of the world, with the the kind of figurative painting that is almost touching on the naive art, creating something that in his time was referred to as “Le Style Mucha”, before it became known as Art Nouveau. Mucha himself did not like the term "art nouveau", quite rightfully pointing out that art was eternal and therefore could not be new.

Mucha's art, particularly when he was at the peak of his creative powers around 1900, above all else is an apotheoses of womanhood. While his women are always strikingly beautiful and often quite voluptuous, one would hesitate to say that the artist saw them as “sex objects”, to use the present-day terminology. While their femininity is always strongly accentuated, there is something about them, perhaps their innocence, that reminds one more of the idealistic Pre-Raphaelite painters than of Mucha's contemporaries, such as the Viennese painter Gustav Klimt, whose portraits, while equally glamorous, are far more sensuous.

There is something else that lies underneath Mucha’s art. While not looking much for inspiration in the works of his contemporaries, nevertheless he could not escape the influence of the occult revival that had hit Paris just before his arrival. It was to profoundly inspire not only the visual artists of his and the next generation (such as Wassily Kandinsky and many other abstract painters, and later also the surrealists), but perhaps even more so people in the other fields of art, musical composers (Debussy, Stravinsky), sculptors (Brancusi), architects, etc. If one looks carefully it is hard not to admit that almost everything in Mucha’s art is about cycles of nature, which to him are closely associated with the evolution of the human spirit.

The theatre posters that he designed for Sara Bernhardt for the play Gismonda became a sensation in Paris in December 1894. Virtually overnight, Mucha found himself famous.

In 1900, when the World Fair was held in Paris, Mucha received the prestigious commission to decorate the Austrian pavilion. Mucha stayed in Paris till 1906, after that he went to America, where he stayed for several year while teaching art at New York and Chicago. After 1910 he lived more or less permanently in and around Prague, but frequently travelled to America.

Mucha was a very versatile artist. He worked on advertisements for various products and on ornamental panels, he had his hand in architectural design, he made a large number of book illustrations, he designed jewellery, he even made some sculptures. From the age of 50 or so, after returning to his homeland, he became much preoccupied with an enormous project he named the Slav Epic, a cycle of monumental paintings illustrating the history of the Slavs, on which he worked intermittently until his death.  

Incidentally, the name Mucha (or moucha) in Czech means fly. A fly on the wall... these pictures, being somewhat voyeuristic, certainly could evoke such an image in one's mind...

One more thing: Mucha's name is nearly always mispronounced. The French were initially to blame for this, but the English speakers don't fall far behind. Properly pronounced, the "CH" in his name should sound approximately as the "ch" in the name of the famous lake Loch Ness in Scotland, as pronounced by a native. 

A woman modelling for Mucha

Go to the gallery of Alphonse Mucha's art