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