On a rainy Sunday in New York City in October 1935, Munro Leaf, an editor at the book publisher Frederick A. Stokes Company, picked up a legal pad and dashed off a story for his friend, the illustrator Robert Lawson. Spun out in forty minutes across six handwritten pages, the draft centered on a young Spanish bull—chosen, Leaf would later say, because “mice and cats and bunnies were played out.” Viking Children’s Books/Penguin Random House Munro Leaf: Manuscript for The Story of Ferdinand, 1936 Leaf had never been to Spain, and the only Spaniards he could think of were the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, so he named his protagonist after the king. Ferdinand is an unlikely hero. Instead of jousting with the other bulls, he prefers to sit quietly under a cork tree and smell the flowers. When bullring scouts see him leaping and snorting after he sits on a bee and gets stung, they take him away to Madrid, convinced that they have found the fiercest bull of all.…