We Can Remember It For You Wholesale is the seventh title in Short Stops, a series from Conversation Tree Press dedicated to bringing exceptional shorter works of fiction to life through beautifully bound, letterpress-printed, limited editions that begin shipping immediately upon announcement. 

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Illustrated by Peter Strain

“...This is the only way you can achieve your, ahem, lifelong dream; am I not correct, sir? You can’t be this; you can’t actually do this.” He chuckled. “But you can have been and have done. We see to that.”

What is real? In We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, Philip K. Dick brings that question to bear on the most intimate territory imaginable—the memories that form the bedrock of a human life, and how easily, it turns out, they can be bought and sold.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1966, and the basis for Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the story follows Douglas Quail, a mild-mannered clerk consumed by an impossible dream: to visit Mars.

Unable to afford the journey, he turns to Rekal, Incorporated, a company that offers something tantalizingly close—implanted memories of an adventure he never had. But something goes wrong, and the line between implanted memory and reality begins to blur.

Compact and relentless, the story moves with the momentum of a thriller while exploring the philosophical terrain that defines Dick’s best work—questions of identity, authenticity, and the nature of reality.

Edition Information

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale is a limited edition of 500 unnumbered copies. A brief overview of the edition, with additional details below:

• Artwork: Peter Strain has contributed three full-colour illustrations, printed separately and individually tipped in by hand.
• Typography: Interior design and typography are by Tony Geer.
• Letterpress printing: Scott Vile at the Ascensius Press printed the edition in Maine (United States) on Neenah Cotton Pearl White Letterpress 118gsm paper.
• Binding: Quarter-bound in metallic book cloth and hand-painted paste papers from Victoria Hall. The endpapers are GF Smith Colorplan with a linen finish.
• Format: The books have a trim size of 6in × 9in and 42 pages including front and back matter.
• Signatures: All copies are signed by the artist.
• Publication price: US$145.
• Availability: In stock and shipping from Canada and England.

The author’s name and title are foil stamped on the spine in the same style as the previous entries in our Short Stops series, ensuring a uniform look across the series.

Availability

Copies of We Can Remember It For You Wholesale are now available to collectors who ordered copies of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle that came with publisher’s rights (i.e. Deluxe copies #1-200 and all Lettered copies), or those who had rights transferred to them. An email has been sent with a private link to order and copies will begin shipping today, May 25th 2026. If you did not receive an email and you believe you should have, please let me know.

Remaining copies will be made available to the public on Friday May 29th at 10 a.m. ET.

Copies ship from Ontario, Canada and from England (limited quantity). For US collectors, we are only shipping with Canada Post and paying pre-processing fees on our end, so we do not expect any brokerage or other fees to be charged on shipments. However, we have no control over US government policy. Please see here for more information for US collectors specifically. 

For logistical and practical reasons we cannot combine orders for this title. Thank you for your understanding.

Artwork by Peter Strain

Peter Strain’s distinctive, multilayered portraits tell entire stories in themselves. We had wanted to work with him for some time, and when we acquired the rights to this story, his work felt so uniquely suited to it that he was the only artist we considered. Fortunately for us, Peter is a huge PKD fan.

The brief was very specific from the start: capture each of the three personas in the story. 

To say that Peter hit this one out of the park would be an understatement. 

Whether you’re new to the story or revisiting it, Peter’s artwork stands as its perfect companion—a second telling that moves in step with this classic text.

About Peter Strain

Peter Strain is an AOI and Communication Arts Award-winning illustrator working and living in Belfast. He creates hand-rendered portraits, animations and distinctive typographic illustrations that distil complex narratives into a single, cohesive image. His work draws on social, cultural and political themes, as well as pop culture and mental health.

Paste Papers Hand-Painted by Victoria Hall

For the first time in our Short Stops series, we’re using paste papers instead of marbled papers. Just as marbling is done by hand, sheet by sheet, in a labour-intensive process, so too are paste papers. 

Victoria Hall created this beautiful pattern in two passes—as shown above—with drying time in between. The layering, overlapping, and combining of colours is a perfect analogy for the multiple personas hidden within, and peeled back from, the protagonist’s memories.

Typography

The title is set in Arillatype.Studio’s At Amiga, an homage to retro computing and sci-fi tales, with Klim Type Foundry’s The Future for the author and illustrator names.

The body text has been set in Emirgre Fonts’s Cardea.

Printing

The text of the edition was letterpress printed at Ascensius Press in Maine, United States. Under the direction of Scott Vile, the Ascensius Press offers book design, letterpress printing, and production coordination services, working with authors, publishers, libraries. They publish their own letterpress editions, and design and produce letterpress and offset works for many preeminent private libraries.

About Short Stops

Books in our Short Stops series are a little different from our other editions that come in multiple states. They:

• Are announced and offered for sale when they are completely finished and in hand, with shipping beginning on the same day we begin accepting orders.
  
• Feature shorter works of fiction.
• Have a trim size of 6in by 9in, slightly smaller than our other 6.7in by 9.5in books.
• Have no rights associated with them and do not include a slipcase.
• Always be offered to current Deluxe and Lettered rights-holders first, even though they have no rights attached to them. Rights holders may skip it entirely without losing rights to the next book from the Press, and having a copy of the most recently published book in the Short Stops series does not give any rights to the next in the series.

Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California.