Nestled among the Midwest farms, small towns, and cheese factories of the Fox River Valley, are nineteen paper mills that provide the backbone of Wisconsin's #1 Paper Producing status. For over 150 years, these mills have been producing high quality printing and writing papers. Thanks to their best efforts, the entire area is a healthy place to live, work, and play with clean air and water.

Our major business is in specialty first-line products. Take a minute to look over on our available inventory and current specials. American Fine Paper is one of the few distributors that gives you significant detail on each specialty grade we offer. These are quality, very low-cost inventories; much of which we have personally inspected and many utilize a high percentage of recycled fibers.

Give us a call today and we'll do our very best to help you find the products you're looking for.

Bond Paper

Bond is one of the original, long lived printing grades. It has its’ own special ream size that was later adopted by ledger and envelope grades.  Since it has been in use by printers from the time they used only small size sheets, the ream size is the smallest of the standard ones at 17" x 22".

Bond is characterized by the use of freesheet or wood free fiber as the Europeans call it. nbsp; That means the fibers come from a chemical separation or pulping method that cleans them up well and leaves little or none of the encrusting material called lignin.  It’s lignin that allows the sheet to yellow and weaken quickly with age. Even grades that contain a percentage of recycled fiber should not contain groundwood (newsprint-like fiber) to be known as bond. Current technology, now used throughout the industry, leaves the sheet very white and bright without the deleterious effects of old style chlorine bleaching on the environment. 

Over the years bond grades have taken on added character and feel by addition of other, more expensive fibers or further processing. Cotton content bond is an example of the former while embossing or watermarking characterize the latter. Copy paper is bond that has been upgraded for dimensional stability and in some cases printability to meet the needs of today’s digital printing technology. Bonds are truly an old grade made new again because of the processing improvements and printing requirements.

Forms bonds have taken on pastel colors like blue, canary, green, for use in form sets. Grades called Register Bonds have gone onto characterize papers used for further mechanical processing such as fan-folders and track-fed printers.

Offset Paper

While similar to bond paper in using wood free or freesheet fiber, offset paper was developed much later than bond paper when new Offset Printing Presses were able to handle much larger sheets.Therefore the ream size for offset is 25" x 38", about 2½ times the size of the bond ream.

Though most mills make their bonds and offsets interchangeably, offset paper is characterized by the presence of “sizing” or chemicals to help resist the water which runs on offset presses. The chemicals don’t affect the printing of bond paper, but they must be there for papers to be printed offset.

Modern printers have a variety of offset grades from which to choose depending upon the end use and image desired. Coated Offset Papers will be discussed in a later paragraph because they are very different from the uncoated offset we’re discussing here. Suffice it to say however the clay coated variety will never have the breadth of end uses dominated by its’ uncoated predecessor.  While there are numerous unprinted uses for plain offset, Text Papers which are generally printed, are recognized as offset sheets with great variety and use.

Groundwood Offset Papers

One bright spot the use of printing papers is the growing usage of Groundwood Specialties or Uncoated Mechanical Papers.   There’s a very wide spectrum for these grades which cover the brightness range from newsprint, at about 60, to bond and offset at 84 – 92. Because so much more of the tree is used when making the various groundwood pulps, they will always be substantially cheaper to use in making paper than chemical pulps.  They tend to have fewer environmental questions as well.

High bright newsprint would come under this category at the low end of the spectrum as would SC-A+ (supercalendered) grades at the high end. The main end uses include newspaper inserts, telephone directories, paperback books, flyers, catalogs, and genommercial printing.

Kraft Papers

These papers were originally called this name from their manufacture by the kraft or sulphate pulping process. It has since come to mean s strong paper used in packaging and industrial paper.  Most people think of kraft as necessarily brown, but millions of tons of bleached paper are made by the kraft process every year as well. When we want to differentiate, we specify it as bleached kraft.

Much of the heavier weight kraft made around the world is linerboard which is used to manufacture cardboard boxes.  The kraft we’re offering is generally lighter in weight and most often used in consumer and industrial bags and sacks. This ream size, unlike earlier ones, was chosen to fit with the so-called English System of weights and measures to make computation easier .England however has since adopted the metric system and has left this country alone in the use of reams of various sizes in determination of basis weight. The Kraft ream, like the Newsprint, Tag, and Specialty ream is 24" x 36" (2 ft. x 3 ft).

While kraft production has been dropping in the United States for many years, it is growing around the world particularly in China. The majority of thekraft we offer is 30 lb to 80 lb.  The lighter weights are more likely to be MG (Machine Glazed) while the heavier stocks of that range are more likely to be MF (Machine Finished). The difference is that the MG papers have a smoother, glossier surface on one side.

Aside from the usual uses in commodity bags and sacks, we sometimes have available a variety of specialty kraft grades.Some for example are use in construction in supporting molds or forms. Grades are used for wrapping, packaging, stuffing or shredding. Come back and continue to check us out.

Coated Groundwood

As I write this in late September of 2007, this grade is in relatively short supply as a result of mill shutdowns. It goes by other names, Coated Mechanical, Coated #5, Publication Grade, etc. It need contain only 10% mechanical or wood-containing fiber to carry this lower quality designation. However it does the job most users need done and is substantially less expensive than the wood-free variety. At one time any groundwood content condemned the grade to #5 status, but brightness and gloss levels have been raised so high for these grades that a small amount of #3 coated mechanical is produced.

Like the uncoated offset introduced earlier, these grades are generally meant to be printed on offset presses and are often referred to, along with the freesheet grade, as Coated Offset. The basis weights are calculated on the previously introduced, 25" x 38" ream, and our offers could be anything between 40# and 100#. Since there are 4-5,000,000 tons of this grade used or produced in just the U.S. alone, there are often large amounts available oddlot.

In spite of the volume of the grade and the current tightness, it continues to be under pressure from lower cost and lower quality SC (supercalendered) grades which can do very much the same job. We discussed these earlier in our Uncoated Groundwood discussion. Unlike the Coated Groundwood Grades which have at least 2½ lbs of coating per side, the SC Papers don’t have good solid clay coatings.They rely only on the hard supercalendered finish to give the sheet its ink holdout. We will offer both Coated Groundwood and SC Grades within these lists, but we’ll be sure to differentiate between them.

Coated Freesheet

These Coated Woodfree papers are the high end of the publication grade spectrum and are used for catalogs, printed advertising, magazines, annual reports etc that can justify a long lasting, quality, look and feel at the extra cost. To classify more than 90% of the fiber must come from a chemical pulping process.

Though some protection legislation has recently passed to protect these grades from crippling competition, the USremains a high cost producer of these sheets. What we pass on to you here is some of the best of those deals.

As discussed above, there are 5 general categories for coated papers in North America. Though a few Groundwood Coated sheets rise to the level of #3, they are by far and away the exception and our current category dominates the No. 1-3 and holds the premium levels exclusively. Cast Coated grades, the best and brightest of the category are all free sheet base.

Coated Papers are first selected for brightness or whiteness and then gloss. While the super premium cast-coated grades can reach up to 94-96 in whiteness, good #1 grades run near 85-87.

Other Grades

You’ll find other grades that we offer like folding box board, linerboard, medium, and tissue, but these have specific end uses and buyers of these grades tend to know their specific needs rather than the general printing need of the majority of users that use our stock.

Keep checking these listings; I’m sure we’ll save you some money.