There's no I in Eames

Type the word "Eames" into Ebay and you' ll have more than 10,000 pieces of furniture to choose from, many of them indeed designed by Charles and Ray Eames, but most of them not. You'll find "Eames" attached to everything from Danish modernism to frumpy old velvet sofas. In fact, anyone selling anything remotely mid-20th-century simply whacks on that word to improve their search ranking, sometimes qualified with the word "era" . This is how e-commerce pays homage to the Eameses, the most important figures in the history of American design, and two of the most influential figures in 20th-century design full stop.

As with all legends, it's perhaps good to be reminded that the Eameses were only human. The couple, who married in 1941 and gave their name to a form of American modernity that is still highly prized today, came to be seen as the king and queen of a kind of design Camelot. However, a new book, The Story of Eames Furniture, sets out to demythologise this power couple, and in exhaustive fashion. This lavishly illustrated, two-volume, 800-page beast aspires to be the definitive work on the designers. Certainly, it is a labour of love. The author, Marilyn Neuhart has been working on the book for 15 years. Her husband, John, a graphic designer, actually worked in the Eames office in the late 1950s, and together they collaborated with the Eameses for the next two decades. So if anyone still knows what it was actually like in that famous studio in the Bay Cities Garage in Venice, California, they do.

There have been many books about the Eameses, but this one is different on two counts. Firstly, and most importantly, it aims to tell the story of Eames furniture not through the famous couple themselves but through their staff – the unsung heroes who figured out how to bend the plywood and weld the metal wires into the iconic chairs for which the Eameses are best known. Secondly, and more controversially, it aims to downplay or – let' s not mince words – demolish the notion that Ray Eames made any significant creative contribution to the designs produced by the studio. You can forget the whole Charles and Ray thing, according to Neuhart, because the "and Ray" part was a façade created by the couple themselves, and then reinforced after their deaths by various designers and writers who, she argues, were not privy to the day- to-day life of the studio.

Neuhart is at pains to point out that Ray, who was a painter, had neither design skills nor managerial ability and was more often than not an obstacle to the work. "She could derail a project meeting in five minutes by singling out and labouring over the most inconsequential detail," writes Neuhart. When credit is deemed to be due, it comes as crushingly faint praise: Ray was good at picking colours, she was a mean flower arranger and boy could she throw an afternoon ice cream party. The picture is so unflattering you almost wonder whether the author has some personal score to settle.

As to how much of this character assassination is true, it's difficult to say. Certainly Ray did design some famous covers for the influential journal Arts & Architecture, as well as the wooden stool-tables of 1960 and various textile patterns. I find it hard not to believe that her aesthetic sensibility played some part in defining the Eames work. Yet even Charles apparently felt that "one of the greatest myths about 20th-century design is that Ray is an equal partner in the office". This last remark, it should be pointed out, is an indirect quote recalled by a staff member. But if he did say it, then why the pretence of a creative duo?

When the pair met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the dashing Charles was already married and yet reputedly could still have had any woman on the campus – his whirlwind romance with the diminutive Ray led Eero Saarinen to quip that he had " exotic tastes". Yet the story of their unlikely union suggests that Charles had finally found the wife who would give him the room to flourish. And that, according to Neuhart, is all Ray ever wanted. "She was Mrs Charles Eames, basically," said Neuhart when I called her up, "and she was happy that way": protecting and moulding the image of a brilliant but difficult and often philandering husband. This appears to have been the bargain at the heart of their marriage.

Whatever Ray's contribution to the studio actually entailed – or didn't – there is a valuable point being made here. If there is one lesson to take away from this book, it's that designers – industrial designers, at least – do not operate in heroic solitude. It's a team effort. And what The Story of Eames Furniture takes away from Ray, it gives to the team. From the early 1940s when Charles started developing moulded plywood splints for the US navy – the first step towards the plywood chairs that would revolutionise the furniture industry – until his death in 1978, dozens of designers and technical staff passed through his office. Neuhart gives us detailed biographies of almost every single one, and they are a colourful cast of characters. There was Norman Bruns, a former boxer and technical whiz who was instrumental in devising the plywood moulding process; Don Albinson, a lynchpin figure and troubleshooter, Harry Bertoia, who is credited with the form of the plywood chairs and went on to be a well-known designer in his own right; Parke Meek, Margaret "Percy" Harris, Griswold "Griz" Raetze. They were a tough generation – many had fought in the war or lived as vagrants during the Depression, including Charles – and exemplified the kind of grit that made postwar America prosper.

Their tasks weren't always glamorous, but they were crucial. Meek, for instance, "worked on the problem of bending the wire insertion that went around the edge of the pad for the upholstered fibreglass chair" – in a nutshell, the very stuff of designing for mass production. Bruns, meanwhile, is credited with choosing from dozens of prototypes the four plywood chairs that went into manufacture and became famous as the "Eames chair". The deadline had arrived and Charles was away travelling. Charles himself is painted as an inspirational figure who commanded fierce loyalty, but was slow to make decisions, too proud to give his staff any credit and, after the late 1940s, less and less interested in furniture anyway – photography and film were his first loves, according to Neuhart.

We ought to be grateful that instead of the hagiography we might expect of such a sumptuous book, it presents the warts-and-all view from inside the studio – at times, it's as though we're eavesdropping on the staff at the watercooler. By giving the Eames office rank and file their curtain call, it usefully explodes idea of the designer as a solitary genius, which has always been a myth. It is one that suits companies such as Herman Miller and Vitra – the producers of Eames furniture – simply because it is easier to sell chairs that embody the aura of the designer, or that retain the trace of his own hand. But design is a collaborative effort – great designers are great synthesisers. And behind each one is a Parke Meek or Norman Bruns.