
Baker himself was born in Kentucky, but raised in Ohio and studied political science and art at DePauw University in Indiana. He eventually settled down in Worthington, Ohio and began working for The Columbus Dispatch in 1947. I can find record of Baker authoring about a dozen books all focusing around the American frontier in the late 1700s/early 1800s, primarily the Ohio and Mid-West regions. These are mostly published under a "Jim Baker's Historical Handbook Series" banner. I can't find a record of Baker's death, but he continued publishing at least through 1976.
The examples below come from a comic book collection of the Ben Hardy strips that Baker self-published under the title From Settlement to Statehood: The Story of Ohio's Growth. The copy I have has a 1965 copyright, but is listed a Second Printing from 1966. It also has a "Book One" notation on the cover, but I believe subsequent books followed a more vertical format and don't convey the book number on the cover, so they tend to appear as stand-alone pieces. Further, they don't appear to reprint the Ben Hardy stories in particular, just the accompanying Border Notes. I've been able to confirm seven additional volumes:
- Trains of Yesteryear,
- The Big Ditch: Small Stories of the Ohio Canals
- The Cabin in the Clearing
- Frontier Medicine
- How Our Counties Got Their Names
- Naming the States
- The Ways of the Warriors



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