An island seemingly running out of the frame in a 16^th century map, seems to suggest the difficulty to read the islands whose names changed over the course of time, and so their borders. Melville warned us that “it is not down in any map; true places never are” (Moby Dick), but since antiquity there is a desire to fix on a map a description of the fluctuant and unstable world of the islands,  in order “ to encompass” them: to surround, contain, envelop, enclose, with steps (com-passare).  Roberta Morosini who has published and is studying islands,  addresses the role of Renaissance  Island Books in the making of the Other and the space of Otherness in the Oriental Mediterranean, and in the Atlantic, with a particular focus on Buondelmonti and Bordone’s Island Books. Bordone is the first to offer in 1528 the earliest known European map of Ciampagu (Japan), and of the Mondo Novo, as he considers both, Japan and North America, respectevely as islands, and a colonized eye on the representation of people and spaces that he had never encountered.