Your hypothesis does not match history, because the early printing was focused on things that had a potentially large market, which at that time meant books like The Bible, with a lot of pages.

The parent article mentions that binding the pages of the first bibles in the correct order, in the absence of page numbers, was an extremely tedious work.

That is why page numbers have invented many years later, exactly as you say, "to help printers not mix up pages".

The Gutenberg Bible was one of the first mass produced books - no page numbers on early copies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#/media/File:Gu...

Hindsight is 20/20 , lol. There are so many obvious, effective constructs and functions in modern English, we kinda miss the absolute janky mess of hacking and tradition and arbitrary rules and facepalm moments that went in to the last 1500+ years of development, let alone the tens of thousands of years prior.

> it wouldn't be surprising if page numbers were a solution to help printers not mix up pages.

It's an interesting idea. Remember they printed large sheets containing many 'pages', I think even in different orientations, which were then folded and the ends cut to produce a nice orderly codex for the reader. They were printing in a different order than the one you read in.

I do think they numbered the large sheets or similar, and you can find old books that retain that number, but I don't recall what it is called.