St Petersburg Numeral Cancellations - Relative Scarcity

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One of my oldest and most loyal clients, M Jacques Vigneron, collects the Numeral Cancellations of St Petersburg. As a researcher, interested in all aspects of the use of the Numeral Cancellations, he buys nearly everything that he finds so that his collection probably gives a very good idea of relative scarcity. At the last count, he had 1556 items in his collection, and with his kind permission I reproduce below the breakdown by Numeral, but ordered from most common to least common:

# 1     536 items    = 34.4%

# 4     148    = 9.5%
# 9     148    = 9.5%
# 6     136    = 8.7%

# 7     109    = 7.0%
# XI   109    = 7.0%

# 5        87    = 5.6%
# 8        84    = 5.4%
# 3        83    = 5.3%

# 14      54    = 3.5%

# 2         31    = 2.0%
# 13       22    = 1.4%

# 15         7    = 0.4%

# 31         2    = 0.1%

# 16         0    = 0%
# 17         0    = 0%

A notable feature of the Numeral Cancellations is that though they are found on letters, cards and banderoles, their use is confined almost entirely to cancelling low value stamps so that a numeral cancel on a stamp above 20 kopecks in face value is really very uncommon.

Added 31 January 2015: Kaj Hellman kindly contributes the following Comments from Helsinki:

It is  very interesting to see these statistics about SPB numeral postmarks !  Most probably nobody has ever done it before.

I had a collection of these already when in secondary school  (that is a long time ago !) .  Then I even exhibited them in the AMPHILEX 1967 youth class.  I had never found the highest numbers , but my dad found the number 16 on a fragment in an antiquarian shop -  that was a lucky day !  This number 16 is perhaps the rarest.  I believe that Oleg Fabergé did not have it. To see in these statistics  that #14 is in scarcity so close to #3 ,  #5  and  #8  is a bit astonishing.  I was always thinking that I can always find the numbers between 1 - XI ,  even in quantities, but that  2, 13, 14 and 15  are the difficult ones .   And the highest numbers  16,  17 and 31 are rarities .  

There was plenty of mail between  St.Petersburg and Finland .  Therefore these numbers can still easily be found here on cards and covers.  Also they have been a very popular field of collecting among Finnish collectors -  especially because there are so many different types.

By the way,  Numbers 16 and 31 I will have in my big March Auction in Helsinki!

Kaj Hellman

 
               

St Petersburg Numeral Cancellations: Number XV

There are lots of collectors of St Petersburg Numeral cancellations, but not everything about these cancellations is known. For example, Baillie and Peel in their book St Petersburg: the Imperial Post (2001)list the dates of introduction of the different Otdyel numerals according to different authors. For number XV Wortman and Prilutzki give the date 1894, Imhof 1899, Ratner 1899, Kiryushkin and Robinson 1894.

I illustrate above strikes of Number 15 on three postcards, the first postmarked 19 May 1898, the second with Finnish receiver cancel for 9 XI [19]01, and the third with St Petersburg postmark 30 X 1902.

The 1898 strike looks like a strike from a brand new canceller, with sharp lines and no build up of old ink. So I make the following hypothesis: this numeral 15 canceller was introduced probably in 1898 but maybe a little earlier.