In his time he was as famous as Charles and Ray Eames. Maybe more so. In 1957, Bloomingdale’s showed 15 McCobb room settings, stocked with 348 designs. “We treat Paul’s furniture like sugar in the grocery store — it’s a staple,” the store’s modern furniture buyer told The New York Times that year.

Indeed, a classic 1961 Playboy Magazine photo of leading furniture designers posing with their chairs (because industrial design was actually considered sexy in those days) was supposed to have included McCobb, along with Charles Eames, George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Harry Bertoia, Eero Saarinen and Jens Risom.

“You see him in photos at the party the night before; his furniture is at the Chicago mansion,” said Jonathan Goldstein, a New York-based design historian and McCobb authority, who interviewed two of McCobb’s staff members about the event. “But the next day in the morning when it’s time to come downstairs for the shoot, he was too hung over.”

Mr. Goldstein described McCobb as charismatic, but said he believed the designer’s irascible personality, corrosive business dealings and lack of champions in the decades that followed his death at the age of 51, from complications of chronic hypertension, helped write him out of the historical record.