I'm 39 years old and have been supporting myself as a full time professional magician for the past 10 years. Before that I worked mostly with programming and other technical stuff. (I've got a "Master of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering, majoring in Mechatrionics.)
Here is my story of how I became a Tenyo-collector (to be honest I copy and pasted it from an old mail to "David de Tenyo" to save some time):
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I was born in 1974 and have been interested in magic for as long as I can remember. The excitement of seeing something unbelievable and imagine that it was real through some gap in the laws of physics or by something yet undiscovered by science. In the early 80:th I began borrowing books at the local library and tried to learn as much as I could, and see as many magic acts as possible. (Which was not as easy considering that this was before Internet and YouTube, and in a time that we had only two TV-channels in Sweden.)
In those days there was a party-store in Stockholm called Butteriks that also had some magic tricks for sale. (They are still in business, but no longer sale Tenyo effects.) At that time the word "Tenyo" didn't mean anything to me - I don't even think I noticed what company made what, but I loved the packages with the pictures on the back, showing the effect. When I couldn't figure out how the trick was done and really wanted to know, I often in the end felt that I just had to have that trick to calm my curiosity - even if the tricks were very expensive. A single Tenyo-trick could cost as much as 100 kronor (about $15), which was a lot of money for me then. (Had I then known that the same tricks would sell on EBay for $500 today, I would have bought even the "easy ones to figure out".)
Often I was surprised by the ingenious solutions and the high quality of the tricks, so after a while a started looking especially for Tenyo-items. Recently my fiancé asked me to make a list of my collection and I discovered that I had about 160 different items - most of which still in mint condition and in their original packaging. Realizing that I had so many I got inspired by the idea of maybe getting a complete serie of all the numbered effects. I started searching on the internet for all the effects not already in my collection, and that's how I found Tenyo.be. I have also recently started looking at items on EBay and placed a few orders in webshops, so I guess my status has just changed from "saver" to "collector".
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This was more then a year ago and now I have almost all the tricks in the T-Serie, except some of the REALLY rare ones. If they ever surface on the market they seem to go for insane amounts, so the sane thing would probably be to stop collecting and accept that my collection will never be complete...but there is a fine line between passion and insanity
