The Eames plywood leg splint market knows how to handle splints in their original packaging, partly because there are so many of them. The Noguchi Coffee Table market, OTOH, has to be looking at this thing and scratching their collecting heads.
Chicago-based Potter & Potter Auctions has a garageful of Eames- and Herman Miller-related material that must have come from a colleague or employee. There are blueprints, Girard & Bertoia, fabric samples, unsigned paintings attributed (by proximity?) to Ray Eames—and an Isamu Noguchi IN50 Coffee Table in apparently mint, unused condition, in its original Herman Miller crate.
The crate has a shipping address on it, twice, for Charles Eames at the Venice studio. It feels like a grail of some kind? But of what? That address has a zip code, so it’s after 1963. And it is printed with a large-format dot matrix printer, which, according to my IBM sources, was not even a thing until like the late 1970s at the earliest. Charles died in 1978.
So unless it’s going straight to a new garage, I assume whoever buys this will unbox it immediately, and end up with a nearly 50-yo coffee table that looks like you just bought it at DWR.
05 June 2025, Lot 38, Isamu Noguchi, IN50 for Herman Miller, mint in box [liveauctioneers via @pwlanier]