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The upcoming topic after the Davos Forum in the beginning of 2018 is Winter Olympics! Attention & tension will get higher the more we get closer to the opening ceremony of the next Winter Games in Korea on February 9th. The PyeongChang 2018 Olympics, XXIII Olympic Winter Games, will be held for 17 days from 9 to 25 February 2018.
Korea Post issued on Oct 31 2017, exactly 100 days before the start of the games, 1.4 million stamps in the format of 2 miniature sheets of 10 stamps each to commemorate the event (1). The stamp designs include the official mascot, Soohorang  illustrated as an olympic athlete in a number of winter sports. Stamps are portrayed along the post, scroll down to discover them all 🙂
Lately, Schwaneberger Verlag GmbH, the publishing house of Michel catalogs, has enriched significantly its offer on Topic catalogs. Each catalog is made of 1'000's of pictures, giving you ideas to collect a specific areas: for example there are more than 33'000 fish species listed on Fishbase but you may be interested only in fish on the list of endangered species. For every topic catalog, we like to see how the web and social media can boost your collection: we look for links, websites, create pinterest boards on collectibles we find and that is how I discovered Olympic Philately !
Timing or not ;-), Michel released just after last Christmas, the 2nd edition of its stamp catalog dedicated to the Olympic Games. The 1st Edition was launch just before the Summer Games in Brazil, the Rio 2016 Olympics.
You never know what you will find when you have to blog about a topic. A feeling I get a lot when dealing with with stamps or catalogs. Stamp catalogs are a tremendous source of information for the philatelist. Besides pricing, stamp catalogs offer tons of information on stamps: technical like the face value, perforations, dimensions, counterfeiting protections, printing quantity, printing method, colors, watermarking but also the artist, the engraver, the date of issue, the first day cover cancel and much more. There are several sorts of catalogs, organized by country, continent (Europe, Africa, Asia,...), part of the world (French colonies, British Empire, German colonies, ...) , or by topic, specialized or handbooks.
Doing some research on Olympic Games on Stamps led me to discover some interesting resources that will extend the scope of your collection.
The mission of the International Association of Olympic Collectors or Association International des Collectionneurs Olympique (AICO) is to promote Olympic collecting related to the cultural and historic aspects of the Olympic movement. Olympic collecting includes Olympic philately, Olympic numismatics and Olympic memorabilia. Olympic philately is a category of collecting in which the images or subjects on the postal products are related to the Olympic Games or the Olympic movement (2) Olympic philately was born on 25 March 1896, the day the first set of Olympic stamps was issued in Greece to commemorate (and help finance) the 1st Modern Olympic Games in Athens. The Philatelic Database lists in its blog post Stamps of Greece: The First Olympic Stamps (1896) the twelve stamps of the serie (3).
The Olympic World Library is simultaneously a library catalogue, an information portal and a search engine for Olympic knowledge. Via this portal you can access the unique collections of The Olympic Studies Centre, with all the official Olympic publications, and also find books, articles and selected dissertations produced by academics and professionals from all around the world. E-books collection is also available for loans (renewable every 28 days): https://library.olympic.org/
This website is an important source of information for fans of paraphilately. If you collect Cinderella Stamps, Vignettes or Posters related to Olympism and the Olympic Games, you will not be able to ignore this page: http://www.alphabetilately.org/Oly/index.html
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