Before the philosophical and legal formulations of the 18th century, the dual nature of the book could be expressed through the use of metaphors. Alonso Víctor de Paredes, printer in Madrid and Seville and author of the first manual on the art of printing in the vernacular, Institución del Arte de la Imprenta y Reglas generales para los componedores, composed around 1680, expresses with force and subtlety the dual nature of the book, as object and work. He reverses the classical metaphor that describes bodies and faces as books, and holds the book to be a human creature because, like man, it has a body and a soul: "I liken a book to the making of a man, who has a rational soul, with which Our Lord created him with all the graces that His Divine Majesty wished to give him; and with the same omnipotence He formed his elegant, beautiful and harmonious body."
If the book can be compared to man, it's because God created the human creature in the same way as a work that comes off the presses. In a memoir published in 1675 to justify the tax immunities of Madrid's printers, a lawyer named Melchor de Cabrera gave the comparison its most elaborate form by listing the six books written by God. The first five are the Starry Heaven , compared to an immense parchment whose stars are the alphabet; the World, which is the sum and map of the whole of Creation; Life, identified with a register containing the names of all the elect; Christ himself, who is both " exemplum" and " exemplar" , the example proposed to all men and the exemplar of reference for mankind; the Virgin, finally, the first of all books, whose creation in the Spirit of God pre-existed that of the World and the centuries. Among God's books, which Cabrera refers to one or other of the objects of the written culture of his time, man is an exception, as he is the result of the work of the printing press: "God put his image and imprint on the press, so that the copy would come out in the form it was supposed to have [...] and at the same time he wanted to be delighted by so many and varied copies of his mysterious original."
Paredes uses the same image of the book compared to the human creature. But, for him, the soul of the book is not only the text as composed, dictated or imagined by its creator. It is this text given in an adequate disposition, " una acertada disposición ": "a perfectly finished book consists of a good doctrine, presented as it should be thanks to the printer and the proofreader, this is what I hold to be the soul of the book; and it is a good impression on the press, clean and neat, that makes me compare it to a graceful and elegant body". If the body of the book is the result of the work of the pressmen, its soul is not shaped by the author alone, but receives its form from all those - master printer, typesetters and proofreaders - who take care of punctuation, spelling and layout. In this way, Paredes rejects in advance any separation between the essential substance of the work, held to be always identical to itself, whatever its form, and the accidental variations in the text that result from operations in the workshop. As a man of the arts, he rejects a similar dichotomy between " substantives " and " accidentals ", to use the terms of material bibliography, between the text in its immaterial permanence and the alterations inflicted by the preferences, habits or errors of those who composed and corrected it. For him, the materiality of the text and the textuality of the book are inseparable.
