If you’ve looked at enough T206 scans, you’ve probably come across some Hindus that look a little weird. Many, like this Beaumont above, were printed with very faint red ink. Others appear to be missing red altogether. This phenomenon is most pronounced on cards with red backgrounds, though it does affect other cards as well. If you take a look at my example scans, you can see that most of these cards appear to have an orange background. Some have more red than others, but all of them are noticeably more orange than a typical example with a different back. 
If you take a close look at other cards with Hindu backs, you can see that red is missing, even when red didn’t figure prominently in the card’s design. 
These two Bradley portraits have a subtle difference; the color of the lips.
I have never heard any theory about why so many Hindus are missing red ink. It would stand to reason that quality control was not a huge concern at American Lithographic Co. where the cards where produced. After all, the cards were to be given away for free as advertising. That said, the overall quality of production across the entire set is quite high in my opinion. Most cards are well-centered with nicely aligned fronts and backs. Colors and shading can vary a bit from one example of a card to another, but rarely to the level we are looking at here.
Here’s my theory: Hindu backs were produced early in the T206 production run. My guess is that at the beginning, quality control was a little bit lax. Most of the Hindus were probably printed, even though the red was not as dark as they wanted. Once the cards were released they became a cultural sensation. People loved them, and as a result the American Tobacco Company may have wanted to ensure that subsequent printings would be of higher quality. It’s also possible that the printers didn’t realize that the design called for more red, because they hadn’t seen enough copies of the cards to be able to tell what they were meant to look like.
In Part One of this series, I took a look at the checklist of the 150-350 series. We’ve seen that not all poses were printed with the same backs. The Piedmont, Sovereign 150 and Sweet Caporal print runs used the majority of the 159 player checklist. The other backs that comprise the 150-350 series did not. In the next few posts of this series, I’m going to take a closer look at the individual backs, beginning with Brown Hindu.
As you can see, level of stardom doesn’t seem to have been taken into consideration. Likewise, geographic location of the teams doesn’t seem to have been a factor. 14 of the 16 Major League teams were included in the omissions and the distribution appears normal. Overall, it doesn’t seem that the omissions fit any kind of pattern.
series, while Old Mill and El Principe de Gales were printed on the backs of cards in the 350 and 460 series, making those backs more plentiful overall. In most cases, Hindu is the second or third toughest back to find for a given player, with Old Mill being the toughest. For players that were printed with both Hindu and EPDG backs, scarcity will be about the same for both.