The Dean Martin Association Journals is a project that endeavors to reproduce all 415 issues of the DMA's newsletters, spanning 51 years between November 1960 and September 2011.
In 2019, The Dean Martin Association had originally considered embarking on reprinting the entire run, instead settling on a 'best of'
with For The Good Times - The Dean Martin Compendium (ISBN 9798758215487). Due to the unexpected success of that 2021 publication and the interest from readers both young and old in our continued work as ambassadors to Dino's life and career, we have decided to go back to the DMA's roots to re-release the newsletters in book-form.
From day one the DMA (originally - and very briefly - called "Dino's Fan Club", then, until 1 April 1973, "The International Dean Martin Club"), was a news and information service - so that's predominantly the format that you'll see here. The style was chatty and relaxed, written by the DMA staff including our founding president Bernard H Thorpe and - very,
very occasionally - by Dean himself. The journals were called
Letter From Dino up until May 1968. They bore no title from then until September 1987, when the journals were named
Just Dino. While the first fully illustrated edition didn't appear until that latter date (the very early journals had a single photograph on the top left of the front page), we have taken the editorial decision to occasionally include images where appropriate and contemporary to the date of the bulletins and articles.
The journals offer both a fascinating glimpse into the development of a society dedicated to a Hollywood icon and a set of contemporary accounts of that icon's career "as it happened".
We will always humbly recognize our good fortune and know that we were very privileged indeed and immensely honored to be associated with Dean Martin and his peers. We were uniquely positioned to report on Dean's career, announcements and updates as soon as his office in Hollywood informed us. We built solid professional relationships too with EMI/Capitol and Warner/Reprise, which naturally extended out to licensees and film companies. We met and crossed paths with innumerable people on the way, exchanging correspondence with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Jimmy Bowen and of course Dean. We are hugely proud of our heritage and we thank everyone who ever supported us and all who still do.
For those of you who were with us in our heyday, we hope this will be a journey of remembrance. For those just joining us, welcome our world...won't you come on in...
