A Scholar of Proverbs Built a Vast Collection of Books. Then Opportunity Knocked.

Brian Jenkins

Good artists copy; great artists steal. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin knew as much, because when he wrote his famous Poor Richard’s Almanack, he did not cite sources for the proverbs that peppered its pages.

To many, quippy sayings like “Time is money” are synonymous with the Founding Father. People think Franklin thought them up. But Wolfgang Mieder, one of the world’s leading proverb scholars, knows better.

Mieder and a colleague traced the saying to a short, anonymous text published in a London-based newspaper, Free Thinker, in 1719. In fact, many of the sayings commonly attributed to Franklin actually come from English proverb collections, said Mieder, a professor of German and folklore at the University of Vermont.

Tracking down the origins of proverbs is “detective work,” he says. “You kind of feel like you’re discovering things.” He has researched and written about cultural wisdoms for nearly five decades and, in the process, amassed a one-of-a-kind scholarly library. It includes about 9,000 books (including 252 that Mieder has written, co-authored, or edited) and 6,500 photocopied articles and dissertations, all about proverbs. He doubts anything like it exists, anywhere.

Until recently, the tomes were stacked high in his home and campus offices. Now, the Burlington university has assembled Mieder’s collection on campus, in the brand-new Wolfgang Mieder International Proverb Library.

How the library came together was quite fortuitous, says Mara Saule, the recently retired director of libraries at the university. Mieder, who is 75, needed a place to store his collection. A wing of the newly renovated Billings Library needed books to fill its shelves. Moving the collection there would kill two birds with one stone.

Or perhaps, says Saule, “Good things come to those who wait.”

‘As Contradictory as Life’?

It was in the 1960s, as a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University, that Mieder first fell in love with the language of proverbs. “I noticed that these bits of wisdom that are part of literature clearly play a significant role as far as rhetoric is concerned, or philosophical ethical messages, but also humor and parody,” he says.

He learned that many of the proverbs people treasure are traceable to Greek and Roman antiquity (“Time flies.”) or to religious texts (“Pride comes before the fall.”) or to an era in which Latin was the lingua franca (“Not everything that glitters is gold.”). Then there are proverbs that are indigenous to specific cultures. “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” and “Go big or go home” are quintessentially American, Mieder says.

Proverbs are not absolute truth, Mieder says, since the wisdoms they impart often don’t align. Yes, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” But also, if you’re “out of sight,” you’re “out of mind.”

“Proverbs are as contradictory as life,” he says.

And they are anything but sacrosanct. Proverbs can be racist, sexist, and ugly. A saying that’s fallen out of fashion, thankfully, is “A woman’s tongue is like a lamb’s tail,” meaning it never stops moving, Mieder says. Proverbs are essentially metaphors and therefore can be harnessed as powerful political rhetoric, he says. Adolf Hitler, with his anti-Semitic proverbs, was a master of that.

Sometimes, a proverb that seems innocuous is not. The phrase “To call a spade a spade” is an old Greek expression that means, essentially, to call something by its name, Mieder says. But in American slang, a “spade” can be a derogatory term for an African-American, and therefore the proverb can take on a racist meaning. Knowing that, it’s best to avoid using it, Mieder wrote in one of his books, Call a Spade a Spade: From Classical Phrase to Racial Slur.

To Mieder, each proverb is a window through which to view history, philosophy, ethics, and culture. “You could say to me, ‘Oh, c’mon, Wolfgang. You spent almost a year doing this,’” Mieder says, referring to the spade book. “But it was a journey. Look at where it took me — to Greek antiquity all the way to card games.”

Mieder tells his students his work is like being King Arthur at the Round Table. He’s got a knowledge base on which to rely. But he has the freedom to take his horse — his scholarship — wherever he pleases. “Proverbs, to me, are so alive,” he says, “and my pleasure in life has been that [in] my scholarship, I can go in any direction I want.”

A Proper Reading Room

Over his career, Mieder’s compass seemed to point everywhere.

He has written about Bob Dylan, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. He has written about Barack Obama, whose “linguistic prowess” is “mind-boggling.” He would write about President Trump, but he can’t, he says. “The man doesn’t use metaphor.”

This winding journey also led Mieder to books. Heaps and heaps of books. Friends sent them from Estonia or Latvia. Mieder tracked them down in secondhand stores, spending $10 on some and $300 on others. (His favorite is Archer Taylor’s classic 1931 study The Proverb. At a shop called Serendipity, he stumbled across the original, dust jacket intact.) He estimates that the whole collection could be worth a quarter of a million dollars, but he’s giving it to the university, free. A penny saved is a penny earned is boring advice, anyhow.

He and his wife, Barbara, who taught high school for 40 years, had to build an addition onto their country home to store all his books. He’d joke to his students that he’d occasionally have to “smuggle” a new book into his own house. Although, Mieder notes, none of his collecting would have happened without his wife’s “interest, care, and love.”

Over the past decade, as the Mieders grew older, they periodically wondered what was going to happen to the collection. Mieder put out feelers, but he’s a realist. Libraries have no space, and books are no longer the coin of the realm. Maybe all good things really do come to an end.

But hope springs eternal.

At his 75th-birthday party, Mieder spoke with Tom Sullivan, then the university’s president, about his dilemma. Sullivan thought a newly renovated library on the campus needed some books to make it feel like a proper reading room. “All of a sudden it clicked,” Mieder says.

Mieder got to work, measuring the bookshelves the university had ordered. “Six of those babies weren’t going to do the trick,” he says, so the university ordered more. A moving company took 15 hours to pack up and move all the books. Now, at home, his office echoes a little, he says.

Mieder’s lifelong collection is displayed behind glass in a wing of the Billings Library, which has a “Hogwarts” feel to it, with a long wooden hallway and high ceilings, says Jeffrey D. Marshall, director of special collections.

It’s wonderful, Mieder says. Already, proverb scholars from China, Kenya, Mongolia, and South Africa, among other countries, have visited. “There are crazy people like myself, a few in every country in the world, who are obsessed,” Mieder says. “In a positive way, I hope.”

Mieder says he was trained in an era when professors built their own libraries. Now that practice is dying out. But he isn’t bitter about it. Different strokes for different folks. He knows his life circumstance allowed him to do it. He and Barbara both worked and have two Labradors, but no children. He isn’t, for example, a young assistant professor with two kids and mounting bills who lives in a small apartment.

“In a way, I’m a dinosaur,” Mieder says. “But I’m so happy that my dinosaur has found a home.”

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.