First issue, distinguished by the lack of decoration in the border, which only contains the names of the winds. A reduced version of the old map of the world first published by Waldseemuller in 1513. In 1522 Fries published a new edition of Ptolemy's 'Geographia', in which nearly all the maps were similarly drawn from Waldseemuller's atlas.

Fries was born in Alsace in about 1490, he studied medicine at the universities of Pavia, Piacenza, Montpellier, and then established himself as a physician in the Alsace region and Switzerland, before settling in Strasbourg, in about 1519. By this time, "he had established a reputation as a writer on medical topics, with several publications already to his credit. Indeed, it was thus that Fries met the Strasbourg printer and publisher Johann Grüninger, an associate of the St. Die group of scholars formed by, among others, Walter Lud, Martin Ringmann and Martin Waldseemuller. It would seem that Gruninger was responsible for printing several of the maps prepared by Waldseemuller, and for supervising the cutting of the maps for the 1513 edition of Ptolemy, edited by the group.

This meeting was to introduce an important digression into Fries' life, and for the next five years, from about 1520 to about 1525, he worked in some capacity as a cartographic editor for or with Grüninger, exploiting the corpus of material that Waldseemuller had created" (Ashley Bayntun-Williams, Map Forum online).