You’re right, it’s not the symbol for Gold. Someone once told me that it was some archaic form and I didn’t bother to check it out, so it’s nice to know now.
There’s plenty of books that have a clearly defined point, so I don’t mind that neither Quicksilver or Cryptonomicon seem to have any real point yet. They might in the end, and they’re entertaining enough at the present, so I’ll let Neal string me along for now.
I read somewhere - probably on these boards - a quote from a NS interview about the Cryptonomicon symbol. He said that he (or maybe an artist friend, I forget) submitted a whole bunch of random meaningful-looking symbols, and the publishers chose that one. It doesn’t have any real meaning, though.
I searched around, rather than starting a new thread …
I read it and liked it very much - I thought it ambitious and successful in its ambitions.
Unfortunately, Stevenson did not wrap it up with a “preliminary ending” to give it a sense of closure.
But that is a minor quibble - the fun was in his take on the emergence of modern Europe and America. 