A private museum in central France has been robbed of one of its most prized possessions. Overnight between 4 and 5 October, intruders entered the Contemporary Art Centre C Karoutzos in Issoire and removed a bronze book cover designed by Salvador Dalí, decorated with gold and precious stones. The cover belongs to an artistic reimagining of the New Testament's Book of Revelation, also known as L'Apocalypse, and had been on display alongside several of the volume's parchment pages. The object is as much a feat of craftsmanship as of art. Dalí produced it between 1958 and 1961 at the request of the art publisher Joseph Forêt, as one of three lavishly illustrated classics the pair created together, alongside editions of Don Quixote and the Divine Comedy. The book comprises 150 giant parchment sheets, with calligraphy alone estimated to have taken more than 2,000 hours, and illustrations contributed by fourteen prominent artists and writers of the twentieth century, including Tsuguharu Foujita, Jean Cocteau and Bernard Buffet. The cover weighs more than 300 pounds, and at the time of its creation the book was valued at two million francs, roughly 4.5 million dollars in today's terms. Its recent history reads like a tour of the postwar art market. After being exhibited around the world in the 1960s and 1970s, the volume passed through Swiss and Japanese collectors before being acquired in 2003 by Christian Karoutzos, an Issoire-based collector who runs an art restoration company and founded the museum that bears his name. The circumstances of the theft have baffled investigators. Karoutzos told French radio that there were no visible signs of forced entry and that the intruders had disconnected the cameras and alarms, calling the episode a mystery. The local prosecutor's office, which is investigating, described the cover as an exceptional and unique piece, while Karoutzos himself called the loss a cultural catastrophe.