The First Printed Page Numbers
3rd March 2014
Printing page numbers (something that appears quite necessary and obvious today) only became common typographic practice from the second quarter of the sixteenth century. And prior to the printed book, ‘foliation remained rare till the end of the Middle Ages’**; and of limited indexical or citational use as manuscripts were very rarely identical.
You had to have printing that made uniform pages before page numbers were of any real use.