On July 3, 2001, at the age of 70, Mordecai Richler passes away from complications related to kidney cancer. He is remembered as a master satirist, a political polemicist, a skilled novelist, an entertaining journalist and a sardonic truth-teller. In these CBC reports, Richler is mourned in his hometown of Montreal and across the country. Fellow writers and friends tell stories about the "prickly writer" who was really an old softy.

• The Richler typesetting font was commissioned by the Giller Prize and Random House of Canada in 2001. This marked the first time a font had been designed as a tribute to a contemporary author. Canadian designer Nick Shinn crafted the distinctive font which was used to set Richler's last book Dispatches from the Sporting Life and will be used for all future reprints of Richler's works. The font's dingbats, or type symbols, include reading glasses, a cigar, a rose, a pen and a glass of scotch.

• At the unveiling of the font, the executive vice-president of Random House Canada said "The Richler font is both timeless and of its time — just like its namesake."
• "Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates." — Mordecai Richler

Medium: Television
Program: The National
Broadcast Date: July 3, 2001
Host: Alison Smith, Reporters: Darrow MacIntyre, Matthew Pace, Commentator: Pierre Berton
Guest(s): Margaret Atwood, June Callwood, Ziggy Eichenbaum, Timothy Findley, Doug Gibson, Margo MacGillivray, Richard Martineau, Terry Mosher, Joel Yanofsky
Duration: 10:14