A Tangled Tale (1885) is Lewis Carroll’s mathematics column dressed as fiction: ten short stories — he called them ‘knots’ — each concealing arithmetical and logical problems, first published serially with readers invited to send in solutions. Carroll’s printed replies, grading and teasing his correspondents by pseudonym, are half the pleasure of the book.
The problems are genuinely tricky and the authorial voice is pure Carroll — courteous, exact, and quietly merciless to sloppy reasoning. Download the free EPUB and try a knot or two before peeking at how the Victorians fared.