Bell and Bain

In my opinion never work with this company. Just to confirm: we have thoroughly checked all copies that are despatched to customers to ensure they are satisfactory.

We have had a long standing relationship with Bell and Bain for around 30 years, doing more than 60 separate print jobs and more than £100,000 of business. Bell and Bain printed the fifth edition of The Castles of Scotland, and did a fantastic job. The book was excellent: printing, binding and finishing.

Bell and Bain, consequently, printed the sixth edition of The Castles of Scotland (9781899874637) in June 2026. This is a very large (1,024 pages) hardback (printed paper case and laminated), 260x190mm with a 64 page colour section. The contract was 1,000 copies for £10,9000.

In brief: they did a bad job, lied about checking all the stock, accepted payment, decided to reprint a proportion of stock, now will not return that stock.

We supplied files. I had been told that they had been having problems with their binding machine and needed an engineer from Germany to fix it.

I got the books but noticed that some of the pages were badly trimmed. This was not through the whole book but the page numbers would move up and down through the book. There should have been at least 6 mm below the bottom of the page number. Some examples below from different books:

Bell and Bain sent two members of staff through to us to check through the stock and assess the extent of the problems. They took away 75 copies, agreeing they were unsatisfactory. They also told me specifically that they had checked through all the stock. This was proved to be untruthful: they had only checked some of the stock and had left hundreds of potentially unsaleable copies with similar or worse problems to the copies display above.

More later…