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Minneapolis author Charles Pappas came up with the idea for his new book on “one of the most disappointing days of my life.”
Pappas is a senior editor for the Minneapolis-based Exhibitor Magazine, which covers expos, fairs and trade shows worldwide. In June 2023, he was on a work trip in France.
"I was consulting to Minneapolis and the U.S. in their bid for Expo 2027, and the vote was taken in Paris."
Minneapolis lost the bid to Belgrade.
“The next day, I got up and just decided to take a long, meandering walk in what I can only describe as a dejected daze.”
Pappas ended up at the Petit Palais, a palace built for the World Fair of 1900.
“It hit me: Our mental idea of Paris is because of the seven world expos there, that everything that you as a tourist would point to mostly came about because of the World Expo — the Petite Palais, Grand Palais, the Pont Alexandre Bridge, the bistro chair,” Pappas says. “And that just kind of was that eureka moment.”
The book is “Nobody Sits Like the French: Exploring Paris Through Its World Expos,” which is out in the U.S. on July 1.
The title inspiration came from the aforementioned bistro chair, the now ubiquitous seat traditionally made with bent wood and woven cane that helped define Paris café culture.
You’ve likely seen it closer to home, too. Restaurants like St. Paul’s Meritage — self-described as “Minnesota’s little slice of Paris” — have a patio full of them.
“It’s one of our very basic mental images of Paris,” Pappas says. “But no one ever really thought of what its origin was, and really the story behind this is kind of fun.”
The design is over 150 years old.
“It was actually called, originally, the number 14 chair, and it won a gold medal at the 1867 World Expo in Paris,” Pappas explains. “It was so popular, it caught on so powerfully, it sold an estimated 50 million units by 1930.”
The book covers the Paris Expos and Fairs from 1855 to 1937, and Pappas dives into many other inventions and landmarks introduced on this world stage, like Roquefort cheese, the Eiffel Tower and the invention of the suitcase rooted in the designs of a Louis Vuitton trunk.
While world fairs and expos have fallen out of favor in the U.S. — the last one was held in New Orleans in 1984 — Pappas says much of the world still uses them as a form of soft power.
“We in the U.S. view it like we do black and white television, something of the past,” Pappas says. “The rest of the world has seen it as a platform to put themselves on an even higher world stage.”
English (US) ·