Help needed about Dumbo!

Michael Barrier mentions the following in his essay:

[A footnote: Syracuse University, Helen Aberson Mayer's alma mater, holds the papers of Helen R. Durney, whose "biographical history" on the university library's Web site includes the following: "Artist and illustrator Helen Durney (?-1970) is best known for her illustrations of Harold and Helen (Aberson) Pearl's story 'Dumbo the Flying Elephant.' Sold to the Walt Disney Corporation in 1939, the story was first published by the Roll-A-Book Company of Syracuse, New York." Here's a description of the Durney collection:

Spanning 1934 to 1942, the Helen R. Durney Papers comprises correspondence, artwork, writings, and memorabilia of the American illustrator. Correspondence consists of miscellaneous correspondence from 1939. Artwork contains Dumbo material as well as sketches for other projects including the Percy Hughes School murals. Writings contains articles, a list of illustrations and promotional ideas for "Dumbo," copies of Durney's column for Design Magazine, and a transcript of her radio program over station WFBL of Syracuse. Memorabilia contains galley proofs for two "Dumbo" books, including the original Roll-a-Book version, and one published copy of "Walt Disney's Dumbo of the Circus," along with articles, clippings, an exhibit catalog, and some artwork by others.

I'm not aware that anyone has examined that material, at least not to report on it through the Web or a printed source, and I know from long experience that such collections can often be very disappointing. I would bet that the galley proofs and such are from the 1941 edition, rather than the original 1939 Roll-A-Book. But still.... ]

Do any of you live close to Syracuse? Would you be willing to try and visit Syracus University to get to the bottom of this?

I was working this weekend on a recently transcribed interview of Dick Huemer by John Culhane, which contains quite a few answers about Dumbo's origins and the famous Roll-A-Book that Michael Barrier discussed lat week in his great essay. Here is a quick excerpt:

[Some work had been done on [the story before Joe Grant and I took over]. Otto Englander may have done some work on it, and Webb Smith. They had done some preliminary work on it based on [...] the basic plot. And then Joe and I took it, and added things like the drunken elephant stuff, the pink elephant sequence, and the crows. We took it and we filled up the segments.]

(Thanks to Dan Caylor for the transcription)

For reasons that will become clear to some of you in a few months I was studying last week the making of Dumbo and remembered that I had at home an item that might interest readers of this blog.

Here is the cover of a small program in Chinese. Since it also contains a few sentences in English inside it was almost certainly published in Hong-Kong, maybe in 1948 for the official first release of the movie there.