Lewis Carroll’s *A Tangled Tale* consists of 10 “Knots.”
Each Knot is a short humorous story built around one or more mathematical or logical problems. Carroll published the series serially in *The Monthly Packet* between April 1880 and March 1885, then gathered the pieces into a book. The episodes use recurring characters and settings, so the collection gradually develops a loose connecting narrative rather than functioning as ten unrelated exercises.
The puzzles range across arithmetic, algebra, geometry, wordplay, and logic. Carroll often supplied solutions and commented on readers’ attempts, sometimes criticizing incorrect methods or identifying answers that worked only by accident. That mixture of fiction, challenge, and authorial commentary is why the work is remembered as both a literary curiosity and a recreational mathematics book. The number can be confused with the page count or with the many individual puzzles embedded inside the stories, but the named structural divisions are exactly ten.