Paul Alexander Casper

Did You Ever Wish You Had an Adventure?

Paul Casper is truly bursting with stories. Talk with him for just a few minutes, and you’ll find that his life is an open book. He’s ready at a moment’s notice with a tale from when he was 10, or 22, or 62 that will illustrate a point, a truth, or simply something about his patently unusual perspective on the world. And a good 70 percent of those stories include an illustration of how he found his way through life without playing by the rules, how he’s part hooligan, part hustler, part misfit….and a success.

A particularly transformative time in his life came at the tender age of 21, when he landed in Paris with dreams of working there and of becoming the Tyrone Power of his day, of wearing expensive Italian suits and spending his days moving among the beautiful people of one of the most romantic cities in the world. Instead, he decides to hop on the Orient Express to Istanbul & India with a wild idea to start a business, life interceded and instead, he embarked on a six-month trek through more than twenty European & Near Eastern countries with little more than the clothes on his back before returning to the United States a completely changed man.

In the years since, he has found that the enduring transformation the journey created in him was fodder for endless stories at business lunches and cocktail parties. For decades, he found his audiences transfixed by how he narrowly escaped freezing to death in the Swiss Alps in the middle of summer, or how he was imprisoned in a Dutch jail without a clue of how to get out, or intrigue with mysterious foreign women and a dog that just might be a witch or of how a series of very improbable events led him to find a flight back to the US with hardly a dollar left in his pocket.

As an award-winning graphic designer, it comes more naturally to Paul to think in visuals rather than in prose. But after a successful career in the publishing world, he also understands the power of the written word. Many have traveled, but few have been able to say that adventure was one of the first building blocks to Paul’s truly unique creative & publishing career.

Working from diaries and sketchbooks that he’s protected in the five decades since he returned from his “European Odyssey”, Paul can bring alive a 1970 Europe that in many ways no longer exists. His journey exemplified the dream of going to Europe to find yourself, something that many fantasized about, but few acted upon.

Paul’s approach to storytelling is captured in vivid color on every page; he seizes on details that might go unnoticed by those without an artistic eye. He also has the heart of a dreamer and knows how to make you feel as if you were alongside him on the journey along with his adventures—and makes you wish at times that you had been there.