This image was lost some time after publication.

Last month, when Penguin Books spent over $2 million on signing up three books on the Wall Street crisis, it seemed they might have been over-estimating the public's hunger for reading about the financial meltdown. Not any more: As the Wall Street Journal reports today, bookstores can hardly keep up with the demand for financial titles, as people scramble to try to understand what the hell just happened.

Particularly popular are books that saw into the future like The Trillion Dollar Meltdown by Charles Morris, which came out in March and predicted a crash that would bring down "a quarter century of free-market zealotry that extolled asset stripping, abusive lending, and hedge fund secrecy." And you definitely know the country's in a strange mood when the bestselling non-fiction book on Amazon is not something by Tori Spelling or Neil Strauss but George Soros's latest book.

Booksellers Race to Add Financial-Advice Titles [WSJ]