wombat1138 | Houdini's tamatebako

Finally bought a copy of Kunihiko Kasahara's The Art and Wonder of Origami, from which I snarfed the tamatebako folding pattern a while back. He gives a historical overview of the object, documenting its first appearance in an 18th-century woodcut illustration of a decorative panel carved with several different traditional origami models and its first known folding patterns to one of Isao Honda's origami books in 1933 (both the basic six-part cube and a fancier "hexahedral" version that connects the flaps of the six square faces into overlapping triads, creating eight additional triangular faces as the truncated vertices of a larger cube). Kasahara also lists the earliest English-language pattern as a "stamp box" (cube only) in a 1937 book.

Semi-coincidentally, last night I browsed through a Barnes and Noble reprint of Harry Houdini's 1922 book Houdini's Paper Magic which turns out to have the pattern for the "hexahedral" tamatebako as a "Japanese hexagon puzzle box", listed with various other traditional models which Houdini learned from a Japanese acquaintance. Sent an email note to the English-language publisher of Kasahara's book hoping to pass the info on to him if he doesn't already have it; got a vacation autoreply.