November Top Shelf: ‘The Chronicles of Harris Burdick’

November’s issue of The Independent, our monthly print newsletter, will be available on the first of the month. For now, here’s a sneak preview of this month’s Top Shelf, The Chronicles of Harris Burdick: Fourteen Amazing Authors Tell the Tales by Chris Van Allsburg with an introduction by BookKids favorite Lemony Snicket.

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~Post by Meghan Dietsche Goel, BookPeople’s Children’s Book Buyer

“If there was an answer, he’d find it there.” reads the caption to one of the enigmatic images catalogued in The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. And that jaunty caption has dangled the unattainable promise of answers in front of readers since Burdick’s famed mysteries were published by Chris Van Allsburg twenty-seven years ago. Inscrutable yet irresistible, the fourteen strange and evocative drawings held within that slim volume have taunted the most determined puzzle-solvers among us for years.

You see, when the mysterious Harris Burdick vanished over twenty-five years ago, he left behind only a series of drawings with captions, drawings so intriguing that they send the imagination involuntarily soaring. Inspired by the enigmas glimpsed within, Van Allsburg decided to publish them together, professing “the hope that … children [would] be inspired by them.” And inspired they have been. For that odd collection of imagery has fueled the imaginative journeys of readers young and old for decades, though it has yielded few answers … until now.

For now, within The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, fourteen of our most ingenious authors have undertaken to uncover the answers to Harris Burdick’s famed mysteries and reveal the long-buried stories behind these moments caught on paper. And who better to tackle this task than writers like Stephen and Tabitha King, Sherman Alexie, Cory Doctorow, Jules Feiffer, Louis Sachar, Jon Scieszka, M.T. Anderson, Linda Sue Park, Kate DiCamillo, Lois Lowry, Walter Dean Myers, Gregory Maguire, and (of course) the man who first set us all on this maddening path, Chris Van Allsburg himself?

But, although these authors profess to offer up some truth at long last, whose truth they offer is up for debate. Perhaps, as Lemony Snicket supposes in his introduction, they are Burdick’s own stories, passed on to each of these authors in turn (and for which they are greedily taking credit). Or perhaps they are pure nonsense drawn from the authors’ own fevered minds. But one thing is sure: while the episodes chronicled range from ominous to whimsical to reflective to simply bizarre, each short tale manages to take us somewhere we have always wanted to go–just a bit further into the tantalizing world of Harris Burdick’s strange portfolio.

If you are the type of reader who would like answers of the straightforward and unmysterious kind, these chronicles may, sadly, disappoint. For even while they seemingly reveal some of Mr. Burdick’s long-kept secrets, you may find they are cunningly planting the seeds of new questions all the while. And as they spin wondrously impossible tales of twins becoming triplets, of moving through space like it is time and moving through time like it is space, or even of a reality in which Granny’s favorite cliches prove unexpectedly wise, they, like Harris Burdick’s original drawings, give us all-too-brief glimpses of possibilities that may just keep our imaginations humming for another twenty-seven years.

Whether these ideas will move you forward in unraveling the mysteries of Harris Burdick or set you back is hard to say. But perhaps, if you’re lucky, they might just send you sideways. And if you would like to know more about how that works, I can only say that “sideways is sideways.”