MINNEAPOLIS — The University of Minnesota recently got a very special delivery.
It came from Europe, cost at least half a million dollars — and is hundreds of years old. The newly acquired map has been called a "bound fragment of time."
Maggie Ragnow, the University of Minnesota's James Ford Bell Library curator, calls this one "something else."
Ragnow says she still can't believe she acquired the rare 17th Century map of the Java Sea, which was hand drawn by Dutch cartographer Johannes Blaeu.
"He was probably certainly one of the best publishers of maps," she said.
The library also has his other pieces, including 12 volumes of a world atlas.
A no-brainer, Ragnow said, was to snatch this one up from a private seller that arrived here just last week.
"You try to build up a picture because scholars usually aren't interested in one example of something, they want to see a body of work," Ragnow said.
The map was a gift from the family the library is named after.
"I think the library is one of those really important portals to the university," said Ford Bell, whose grandfather founded General Mills, and was a longtime University regent.
The two men share a passion for the history of trade.
"It's very cool to be able to acquire these totally unique objects for people to see, for people to learn from," Bell said, adding, "and see a part of the world that is hard for them to imagine."
The map meticulously helped ships sailing from the Indian Ocean or further south, now giving people in the present a peek at the past for many years to come.
"It's a piece of a puzzle to put together how we got to the world we have today," Ragnow said. "For us to acquire it means that it's now available to everyone in the world."
The map isn't on display — it has to be stored in a protective box in the library's vault — but it can be taken out, for both the public and researchers to not only study it, but to look at and touch it, too.
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