“This morning in Toronto at a gathering of friends and media it was announced that a typeface has been commissioned and designed in memory of Mordecai Richler, the esteemed Canadian author of books including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain’s Horseman, Solomon Gursky Was Here, and Barney’s Version. Mordecai Richler passed away on July 3rd of this year.

The font was jointly commissioned by The Giller Prize and Random House of Canada in consultation with the Richler family. The tribute is unique. Never before has a font been commissioned by a Canadian cultural institution from a Canadian designer in honour of a Canadian and while several fonts bear the names of famous books or authors, those associations were made post-facto. Commissioning a font as a tribute to a contemporary writer is unprecedented in recorded type history.

The font will become the official typeface of The Giller Prize and will be used by Random House of Canada to set Richler’s last book, Dispatches from the Sporting Life, to be published in spring 2002. […]”