Donald appearing in a random book years before his first cartoon is pretty wild to me man. Yeah he isn’t really the Donald we know, but at the very least some author dreamed up the idea of a duck with that name.
But we’ll never know who that author was. The book was credited to the Disney staff as a group.
To be fair this isn’t a random book, it’s the FIRST Disney book ever. This is a merchandising holy grail. Merch wasn’t as common in 1931, but Disney basically invented mass licensing right around that time.
Mickey’s a farm mouse in this book, like he was in the cartoons. It’s sort of wholesome seeing him with his OG friends like Horace and Clarabelle.