Thieves in central France have made off with one of the stranger art thefts in recent memory: a 150-kilogram bronze book cover designed by Salvador Dalí, snatched from a private art centre in the small town of Issoire. The parchment pages it once protected are safe in a vault — the criminals only wanted the metal.
The missing piece is the casing for The Apocalypse of Saint John, a one-of-a-kind artist's book conceived in 1958 by French publisher Joseph Forêt. It's a heavyweight collaboration in every sense: seven artists (Dalí, Bernard Buffet, Léonard Foujita, Leonor Fini, Georges Mathieu, Pierre-Yves Trémois and Ossip Zadkine) and seven writers, among them Jean Cocteau, Jean Giono, Emil Cioran, Ernst Jünger and Jean Rostand. Calligrapher Micheline Nicolas hand-wrote the biblical text across roughly 150 parchment sheets — around 93,000 to 95,000 letters, stretching some 150 metres if laid end to end. The whole volume tips the scales at about 210 kilograms.
Dalí worked on the bronze cover between 1958 and 1961 using lost-wax casting, and it was never meant to be a mere jacket. It incorporates gold, precious stones, shells, nails and gold cutlery. The finished book was unveiled at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris in 1961, toured internationally, and spent time in Switzerland and Japan before collector Christian Karoutzos bought it in 2003. French media value the complete work in the millions of euros.
The break-in happened overnight between October 4 and 5 at the C. Karoutzos Contemporary Art Center in the Puy-de-Dôme department, where the book was on display through the end of October. Staff discovered the theft the next morning. The culprits disabled the surveillance system and took the recording equipment, damaged the main gate, and left only the base of the cover near a staircase. How two or more people moved 150 kilos of bronze out of the building is one of the questions the Clermont-Ferrand prosecutor's office and the local gendarmerie's research unit are now trying to answer. No suspects have been named.
The owner's biggest fear isn't a black-market sale — it's the smelter. With bronze, gold and precious stones in the mix, the cover could be melted down for raw material value, destroying the artwork entirely. Its very distinctiveness, though, also makes it hard to move or disguise, which may work in investigators' favour if it resurfaces.
The heist fits a worrying pattern in Europe. The Louvre lost French Crown jewels in October 2025, Spain's Villena Treasure was raided in a four-minute robbery in August 2026, and two Renoir paintings were stolen from the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer in September. The Dalí case stands apart for its sheer oddity: a single, documented artwork whose identity is inseparable from its physical form. For travellers drawn to France's regional museums and small-town cultural gems, it's a reminder that some of the country's most remarkable works sit far from Paris — and, right now, one of them is missing.