Printing a list of lists, without brackets

The following will do it:

for item in l:
  print item[0], ', '.join(map(str, item[1:]))

where l is your list.

For your input, this prints out

tables 1, 2
ladders 2, 5
chairs 2

If you don't mind that the output is on separate lines:

foo = [["tables", 1, 2], ["ladders", 2, 5], ["chairs", 2]]
for table in foo:
    print "%s %s" %(table[0],", ".join(map(str,table[1:])))

To get this all on the same line makes it slightly more difficult:

import sys
foo = [["tables", 1, 2], ["ladders", 2, 5], ["chairs", 2]]
for table in foo:
    sys.stdout.write("%s %s " %(table[0],", ".join(map(str,table[1:]))))

print