When Wittgenstein started writing the Notebooks 1914–1916 in September 1914, he believed that he was producing a theory. He abandoned the theoretical stance only in the process of his work. Wittgenstein gradually realized that what he was producing was not a theory but a manual for correcting and improving our language and thinking. However, echoes of Wittgenstein initial theoretical stance are easily discernible in the Tractatus, for example, in its ordering in a strict numerical system. This highly implicit incongruence makes the book notoriously difficult to understand. The present chapter undertakes a historical account of the work’s composition, with an eye to clarifying expository aspects of the book that readers over the decades have found puzzling or unintelligible.