NEW YORK — Bondage devices have a casual place in Joshua Jay’s studio apartment in Chelsea.

Right there, out in the open, you can see metal thumb restraints, handcuffs of every ilk and a full-body straitjacket with leather straps.

“I guess I never realized how many sex toys we have around here,” said Anna Kloots, 25, Jay’s fiancée and assistant, “but these are all way too valuable to use.”

Jay, 33, is a magician whose home is also his archive for books and props that belonged to his heroes and predecessors.

He displays a pair of white gloves that were worn by Richard Valentine Pitchford, the British conjurer who practiced under the name Cardini. Pitchford honed his card tricks in chilly World War I trenches and became so accustomed to working with gloves, then unusual among magicians, that he continued to wear them throughout his long career. (Jay has his war medals, too.)

The straitjacket was used by Harry Houdini. “And no, you can’t look inside,” Jay said, scolding a visitor who was inching closer to spot any levers or escape hatches the garment might conceal. Here, secrets of tradecraft remain immortal.

“I haven’t even gotten to see it yet,” Kloots said. “And I live here.”

The 750-square-foot apartment also contains cheating devices such as vintage playing-card trimmers that can subtly square off rounded corners or clip margins, and illusionist-themed artwork, such as a 19th-century poster promoting P.T. Selbit, the first magician to appear to saw a woman in half.

The latest addition to the hoard is a sparkling pink tuxedo jacket that belonged to Doug Henning, the Emmy-winning magician. Henning reached the height of his celebrity in the 1970s and ’80s, at which time his hands were insured for $3 million.

“It fits me perfectly,” said Kloots, modeling the jacket, which was bought at auction for about $2,000. (Henning was 5 feet 6 inches, a full 3 inches taller than Houdini.) “But where do you expect to put it?” she asked Jay, who is 6 feet 3.

The couple won’t live in their studio forever, but it will remain their home at least until they get married. They’re planning a late-summer wedding in Manhattan that will feature an hourlong magic show put on by their favorite performers. Jay is keeping the playbill secret from Kloots and will reveal only that David Copperfield and Penn & Teller are not on the list.

A ‘seminal moment’

Jay fell in love with magic at the age of 8. His father, Jeffrey, a dentist in Canton, Ohio, showed him a card trick from the 1940s known as Out of This World. The subject, invited to use the power of the mind to discern whether cards being dealt face down in two piles are red or black, is shown to have perfect accuracy.

Mesmerized, Joshua retreated to his room to sort things out, not surfacing until he had reverse-engineered the trick.

“That was a seminal moment for me,” he said. “It really hooked me in.”

Although he has performed in 63 countries and is scheduled to appear on “Today” on New Year’s Day, Jay still trails in recognition value far behind magicians Copperfield, Criss Angel and Ricky Jay (who is no relation).

He would be more familiar if he spent more time on television. But it’s not the best medium for his brand of intimate conjuring, which he does with few props or distractions, apart from a lively patter.

“Very minimalist magic,” he calls his tricks, including turning a $1 bill into $100, bending quarters with his “mind” and swallowing two dozen straight pins.

“You can’t misdirect a camera,” he said.

The collection

The collected objects dearest to Jay are the ones that intersect with key points of magic history.

He owns a rare first edition (perhaps one of a dozen known copies) of “The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” Written in 1584 by Reginald Scot, an English member of Parliament, it is said to be the first book to expose magic as trickery, not sorcery.

“At the time it was published, they were burning magicians as witches,” he said.

Although impressive, Jay’s collection looks modest compared with that of Copperfield, a billionaire who has reportedly acquired 150,000 magic-related items now in a warehouse in Las Vegas. Jay would have liked some of those pieces and said he doubts Copperfield knows how often he tried to outbid him at auction.

“When I think of his unlimited funds, I get hit by fits of despair,” Jay said, adding that he was able to buy a Houdini straitjacket only “because Copperfield already had one.”

Which may be a blessing in disguise: Keeping order in the small apartment, which also functions as a trick-development laboratory, has not been easy.

When Kloots moved in this year, the couple pared down the collection, keeping 1,000 books and the most precious objects and putting the rest in storage in Ohio.

Even then, Kloots asked for another 10 percent reduction, and Jay has established a policy of banishing a piece for every one he acquires.

Still, there was a point when it looked like he would have to fall back on his entrepreneurial efforts and collectibles. About six years ago, while tubing behind a motorboat on a lake in Ohio, he crashed into a metal buoy at high speed and mangled his left hand.

The first specialist who saw him refused to operate, saying Jay would likely never perform again. The second, Dr. Peter Evans, an orthopedic surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who is a hand specialist for the professional sports teams in town, was more optimistic.

After three surgeries and lots of physical rehabilitation, Jay has regained about 90 percent of his hand function. He has trained his ring finger to help compensate for the damage to the pinkie, a workhorse for sleight-of-hand tricks.

A visitor was prompted to ask whether he had kept the cast, a kind of restraint that surely deserved a place among his collectibles. The thought never occurred to him.

“I probably incinerated it,” he said.