The best example that life can be unfair, even to the well-heeled, is the recent theft of a 150 kg (330 lb) book cover designed by Salvador Dalí from a French museum. Made entirely of bronze, the cover of the Book of Revelation (Livre de l’Apocalypse) was stolen from the Centre d’art contemporain in Issoire, in Puy-de-Dôme, central France, overnight on Sunday. It was owned by private collector Christian Karoutzos, who spent a decade paying for it.
Like a savior of such irreplaceable art, he not only saved it from being dismantled by its Japanese owners, but also returned it to the region where its creator, Joseph Forêt, was born. Unfortunately for him, and to the utmost astonishment of the police and the world, someone actually stole the heavyweight cover.
Once the world’s heaviest and most expensive book (its total weight is a whopping 210 kg, roughly equalling a Harley Davidson cruiser), the 150kg cover couldn’t have possibly been carried out by one person alone. The literal 463-pound “book-cathedral” sculpted by Dalí was described by the Clermont-Ferrand public prosecutor’s office as “a work of art of great value,” reported Time France. The bronze blanket is said to be worth several million euros. The deeply distraught owner said, “It’s a cathedral-like, masterful work, unique in the world. France was murdered last night; French heritage was murdered.”
What lies inside the Book of Revelation?
A true masterpiece, the 210 kg book is completely irreplaceable. It reflected on Forêt’s obsession with the number seven, drawing on Revelation’s seven churches, seven seals, seven trumpets, and other groups of seven. A total of seven artists (Salvador Dalí, Bernard Buffet, Léonard Foujita, Leonor Fini, Georges Mathieu, Pierre-Yves Trémois, and Ossip Zadkine) worked on the book, which comprises roughly 150 large parchment sheets. The list of seven writers included Jean Cocteau, Jean Giono, Emil Cioran, Ernst Jünger, Jean Rostand, Jean Guitton, and Daniel-Rops. Its roughly 95,000 letters were painstakingly handwritten by Micheline Nicolas.
As for the cover, it was an objet d’art in itself. Created using the lost-wax bronze casting process, Dalí incorporated everything from seashells, nails, and gold knives and forks to precious stones into the cover. According to Syracuse University’s Special Collections, which has studied Forêt and Dalí’s extravagant publishing projects, L’Apocalypse is indeed Forêt’s most spectacular creation, valued at 100 million old francs in 1961. The university has suggested that an equivalent object could be worth $25 million to $75 million today. Karoutzos, whose private center contains roughly 300 works by around 60 artists across four rooms and two floors, told Le Parisien just weeks before the burglary that he had paid several million euros for the one-of-a-kind creation, and that it took him a decade to pay for the acquisition.
