[News] News of January

The year is still young, so there are still many countries announcing their stamp issue plans for 2022. January was thus a month full of news. As I am very busy the next time, I am posting already a day early, so without further ado here are the News of January:

• For 2022 two sets are planned about The Lord of the Rings. One will be from New Zealand and one from Portugal. I assume that the set from New Zealand will be similar to last year's issue. The issue date of that one is the 1st June, the Portuguese set has no issue date as of now.
• An image of the German Benjamin Blümchen stamp became available. It shows the famous elephant on a white background with flowers. Although I still do not like the matrixcode, this issue is one of my personal highlights for 2022.
• The Latvian issue plan was updated with issue dates and the second stamp in the World Tales series started in 2021 is announced for the 16th May.
• When the British programme was announced, like usual it included some TBA issues. Through other channels however it was revealed that those are the Jubilee of Queen, Transformers (1st September) and Aardman (10th October). Not sure what we should think about the Transformers issue, but Aardman is surely something to look forward to.
• USPS announced some more stamps for the year. Among them is a single stamp about Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree. No issue date was announced yet.
• The Slovenian stamp about Ela Peroci was issued a few days ago and the image was shown some days earlier. Next to a portrait of the authoress it shows an illustration from her most famous book, Muca Copatarica (Slipper Keeper Kitty) illustrated by Ančka Gošnik Godec.
• Singapore announced another set about Singapore Mascots. Planned issue date is in June, but let's see if it will be issued on time this year (as a reminder: the first set in 2020 was postponed from April to August due to Covid-19).
• The Armenian programme includes a single stamp about Cartoons in the second quarter. In recent years always two stamps about this theme were issued, so I assume that another one will be announced (or rather issued without announcement) later.
• Images of the first EUROPA stamps of 2022 became available. I like the stamps from Liechtenstein, but of the ones shown yet I would only consider the Russian stamp for this part of my thematic collection. As I said before, I will not mention all of them here and will also not try to collect all. The EUROPA Stamp Blog however does a great job in also including short summaries of the depicted tales. Go check it out!

The only new issue of the month is the Ela Peroci stamp from Slovenia.

I did not got any new stamps for my collection this month, but I have uploaded the LOTR stamps from New Zealand that I got in late December.