Page Numbers

Page numbers are wild

History

Scrolls

Scroll culture lacked pagination because a scroll’s “text was continuous and lacked page breaks” (Lyons 35). Though Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans of antiquity divided scrolls’ text and images into columns called paginae, the emergence of the codex—a collection of leaves bound on one side—after the first century AD introduced a new organizational mode through pages (Mak 4).