The bisect stamps can only be collected on a whole cover or on piece with the postmark. This table had an index of 306 items compiled for the study. This readily demonstrates that the St.Thomas post office used 80 % of the total with the two post offices on St.Croix using approx. 10 % each.

Post Office       Partial                Envelopes          Total items

St.Thomas         75                        167                      242   (79,8%)

Christiansted     5                          23                        28   (9,2%)

Frederiksted      8                          28                        36   (11,85)

Three items had the 4-rings St.Thomas arrival cancel - used on letters without a postmark.

So the 4-rings cancel is the rarest cancel on bisected stamps - excluding the single known St.Jan cover. 

The 242 St.Thomas items can be subdivided as follows:

Domestic envelopes and one postcard:        221 items  (93%)

Foreign printed matter:                                   5 items  (2%)  

Foreign postcards:                                          16 items (5)

These data make it possible to assign relative scarcity values to infrequently seen items. It should be mentioned that any of the postcards or printed matter items listed above had stamps from Printing 2.

The tabulation has two surprises. First - whole covers are significantly more plentiful than stamps on patials - but all stamp catalogs agree on assigning a greater catalog value to the covers. This of course makes sense as otherwise covers could easily be cut and reduced to partials increasing their value.

The second surprice was how few inverted frames (eight items) being indexed. All prior publications agree that the most commenly used stamps were from Printing 4 that had 11 inverted frames in positions 51 and 91-100.

Printing 3 had a single inverted frame in position 51. After discounting the use of Printing 2 stamps - the inverted frame count should have been closer to 20. One possible answer is - that the cancel obscured the identification of the scrolls in the upper right and lower left corners. A whole stamp has both corner scrolls - but the bisected stamp has in approx. half the cases only one coner available for identification (Please refer to the bottom of the page "THE DWI 4 CENTS" showing the 4 possible diagonally products of bisecting). It should be mentioned that the inverted frame was not described intil 1917.