In the mid-‘70s, James Patrick Finnegan came out west to San Francisco, like many others, looking for a fresh start. He had just gotten fired from a teaching job at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The Bay was just supposed to be a detour — the longtime artist’s final (planned) destination was Hawaii. So when he rode his BMW M750 motorcycle into town, he figured he’d catch up with a few artist pals and head on out.
But as many before and after him did, Finnegan stuck around, and began working out of an artist loft on Stevenson St. in the Mission. When he wasn’t in the studio, he would go off the beaten path in San Francisco by foot or by bike.
And then the idea came to him, while walking around his adopted city: To make a guide of all the businesses that shared his name, complete with photos of himself in front of them. It was never that serious.
“We would go out and just investigate the city, look around, and I just really enjoyed being in San Francisco,” Finnegan, 80, told Gazetteer SF.
Finnegan self-published it in 1977 with the help of a few friends, including a Rolling Stone contributor. Nothing much came of the guide, and he went on to have a successful career as an artist and instructor. His works have been displayed at SFMOMA’s Artist Gallery, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, and galleries all over Thailand. He now lives in the small Marin County outpost of Woodacre.
But, somehow, Jim’s Guide to San Francisco — in all its DIY, off-the-cuff charm — has become a collector’s item. The lone copy currently in circulation is going for $300 (or best offer). Blame fate, or the internet, the guide has lived on as a piece of vintage San Francisco. When I reached out to him last month, Finnegan had no idea.
The origin story is as simple as the guide itself, a booklet glued at the spine.
“I started to see my name on things” while walking around the city Finnegan had made his home, he told me over the phone. “Like Jim's Donut Shop or, you know, Jim's Grocery.”
Plenty of neighborhood haunts are named after their proprietors; a peek at any vintage city directory will tell you it’s common for first-names-as-business-names to cluster. In San Francisco of yore, Ed and Ken and Larry had barber shops; Jack and Harold had bars.
For whatever reason, Finnegan believed that his name and surname weren’t all that common. (He recalled later in life meeting New Yorker writer William Finnegan at a book reading. “I said, ‘You know, I used to think I was the only person with that name,’” he recalled, “and he just said, ‘You've obviously never been to Boston.’”)
One of the key charms of Jim’s Guide is how thoroughly its namesake committed to the bit. Over the course of a year, he and his then-girlfriend, Patty Myers, trekked around San Francisco in a Volkswagen bus, looking for Jim’s and James’ (and one St. James) for him to take pictures in front of.
In each of the 15-odd photos, Finnegan, with his long brown hair in a tight middle part, poses in front of a business. He is often costumed appropriately: In front of a law office belonging to another James P. Finnegan, for instance, he busted out a pair of round-rimmed glasses and a dressy coat.
“I have my hand on the door knob, looking kind of dressed up, what I thought a lawyer would look like,” Finnegan said. “He opened the door and I had to explain that we have the same name.” The attorney was none too pleased with his artist counterpart, he recalled.
Outside of a grocery store in the Mission — called Jim’s, of course — he cosplayed as a shopkeep, complete with apron and broomstick. At St. James Presbyterian Church, at 240 Leland, he wore a black shirt and a mock-clerical collar.
As more people got involved, Finnegan got more invested in the process. He roped in a friend, the legendary Rolling Stone staffer Jeanne Jambu, who had access to the Stone’s printers; she managed to print out black-and-white copies at the office, and they glued the pages together, accordion-style.
The final product is less a travelogue than an early zine. A hand-drawn map in the back of the book pinpoints all of the Jim's he's seen. One of the most charming things about the guide is that each remaining copy has unique coloring: a feature, not a bug. “I would have a party and everybody would get a color pencil and they would color in one image,” Finnegan told me.
Of the copies publicly available — one on eBay, the other, a copy that Finnegan kept around — each is hand-colored ever so differently. Outside of a smoke shop, his outfit is shaded with enough precision that, at a quick glance, you’d think he was the only color part of the black-and-white shot; elsewhere, things were scribbled in with the energy of a preschooler who just woke up from a nap.
The cover of the guide features a grinning Finnegan in a circle, gesturing to the Golden Gate Bridge, and inside is a photo, a brief caption, and said brief caption translated in French and Japanese. (“As a tourist thing, I guess,” he offered when I asked.)
Finnegan had printed out 100-some copies, and distributed them to friends and family. It got stocked at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a small L.A. art bookshop, he recalled, and got notice from venerated art librarian Judith Hoffberg, who wrote in her art journal Umbrella that it was “an imaginative guide to easily avoided points of interest in San Francisco.”
He originally had bigger ambitions for the book.
“I had the idea — I sort of fantasized about it being a coffee table book,” he said. “One couple was interested in funding it but it didn’t really happen.”
Finnegan eventually left San Francisco. He kept a copy of the guide with him.
When I called him for the first time last month, Finnegan was surprised to hear from someone about it.
“How did you find out about it?” he asked, with a slight chuckle.
I have Alex Boese, author and co-creator of Web 2.0 fixtures Museum of Hoaxes and Weird Universe, to thank. In his hours of internet spelunking, he found Hoffberg’s write-up in Umbrella and wrote a quick blog post about it this June.
“I'm always glad when I come across really obscure things like that and bring them a bit more to public attention because forgotten history is one of those things I really love,” Boese told me, when I reached out to ask him about his blog post. In his post, he lamented the going price for the remaining copy of the guide.
The seller, Joe Verdugo, is selling it for so much because it’s how he makes a living. Verdugo, a Palm Springs-based eBay seller who’s been buying up storage units and reselling their contents for more than 25 years, found the copy in a storage unit he purchased for $650 in 2017.
The locker belonged to a late Berkeley professor named, of course, Jim Brown, who had rented it for 27 years. “It was just the biggest locker full of books I’ve ever seen in my life,” Verdugo said.
It was stacked up to the ceiling at all sides with old suitcases and boxes full of books and magazines and other odds and ends. It took Verdugo two months to clear it out — books are heavy, after all.
Among the treasures were rare copies of Rolling Stone (“back when it was still in newspaper form,” he added) and Time from the ’60s and ‘70s. Just about everything this particular Jim had in his storage unit — from a Woodstock copy of Time to vintage dolls — has sold for a few hundred dollars a pop.
When I told Jim Finnegan about the going rate for his guide, he was stunned. “Wow,” he sighed. “Amazing!”
He seemed amused that anyone has remembered this relic of his youth. None of the places in the book have lived on — save for the church. He has no plans to recreate the guide; he doesn’t come around to San Francisco much anymore, anyway.
And so, it is a minor miracle that this guide’s legacy is still here, kept alive in the near-fifty years since he published it. Thank the oddballs across generations who were charmed enough by this guy’s story to preserve it in their own way.
