AboutCASE PAPER COMPANY INC.
For over 78 years, we’ve dedicated ourselves to going above and beyond for our customers, such as taking sales calls at 5 am, rushing out emergency orders, converting custom sizes, working through weekends, catering weddings, giving haircuts, performing life-saving medical procedures, winning Olympic medals… well, we’ve done at least some of those things. Heroism aside, over the past 78 years we’ve learned all the ins and outs and nooks and crannies of this business, though, frankly, we still aren’t quite sure what a cranny is. But we digress…
Our story started in in the early 1940s when Irv Schaffer and brothers Oscar and David Kosh founded Case Paper. Actually, it started in the mid 1930s, when the founders met each other as salesmen for the Aronson Paper Co. Then again, maybe it all started when Irv’s father Morris invited a lovely young woman named Anna out to dinner one August evening in 1904…
For the sake of moving things along, let’s just say it definitely started in 1941 when Livingston & Southard, a steel exporter wishing to get into the paper export business, recruited Irv to lead its paper export efforts. Unfortunately, the global political scene in 1941 was a little… let’s say, “shaky.” The threat of paper shipments being torpedoed by German U-boats made the idea of exporting paper internationally a little less appealing, and L&S soon offered Irv the chance to buy its paper business.
The rest, as they say, is paper history. Irv, Oscar, and Dave set up a domestic operation, naming the business after the wooden “cases” in which paper was shipped and stored in those days. Fortunately, the name “Case Paper” won out over “Truck Paper,” “Warehouse Paper,” and “Over There in the Corner Paper.”
Though paper was a bit difficult to source during the early years, Case Paper got by. The three brothers spent their time figuring out how to find and deliver paper to paper-starved printers (“Hey buddy, can you spare a ream?”) from a converted 19th-century stable on Downing Street in New York City. Once the war ended, the trio moved the business to Greenwich Village, where they remained until 1958, when they built a 100,000-square-foot warehouse and headquarters in Long Island City, NY. Here the company expanded not only its space, but also its business operations to include slitters, sheeters, and guillotine cutters (a more humane alternative for converting paper than the traditional paper gallows). By the mid-1960s, Case Paper was spreading across New York like pigeons and pizza, only we were less liable to steal your French fries or expand your waistline.
Now, all these years later, Case Paper has grown to seven nationwide divisions, and is still on a roll (when it’s not being cut into sheets). And while the business of paper has changed, our core commitment to being “on the case” for every customer has remained the same. It isn’t easy, but we believe printers and packagers deserve to get precisely the paper and board they need, exactly when they need it. And that’s why, while our paper and paperboard no longer come in a case, we’ll continue to be on the case.
