Dean Martin's career as it unfolded...

Available now from memoryhive.co.uk/store, "The Dean Martin Association Journals" (ISSN 27536793) is a long-term project that endeavours to reproduce the entire 415-issue run of the DMA’s newsletters published between November 1960 and September 2011. The journals are published quarterly in high-quality A4 saddle-stitch format and edited by me, Elliot Thorpe, with consultant Ron Iveson.

In 2019, we had originally considered embarking on reprinting the 51-year 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 our roots and, with the team at memoryhive.co.uk, re-release the newsletters in omnibus editions.

From day one The Dean Martin Association was a news and information service, so that’s predominantly the format that you’ll see throughout. The style was chatty and relaxed. 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 must make it clear though that as the material featured in these volumes dates back across some seven decades, the master documents do vary in quality by way of content (including sensibilities and attitudes of the time) and printing (we acknowledge some of the reproductions within are difficult to read clearly but we have included them in any case to make this part-work comprehensive as an historical record). We have also had to remove personal/contact details of some organisations mentioned in and of some of the subscribers to the original newsletters, so you may notice passages of text blanked out or cropped from time to time.

Up until May 1968, the journals were called 'Letter From Dino'. 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 early journals had a single photograph on the top left of the front page), we have taken the editorial decision to include images where appropriate and contemporary to the date of the bulletins and articles.

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…