LONDON (Reuters) - Since the terrible and baffling events of Sept. 11, readers around the world have been scrambling to understand the mind of the man America blames: Osama bin Laden.
Largely ignored for years, the dusty foreign affairs sections of academic bookshops have been besieged by customers seeking to quickly educate themselves about bin Laden, his al Qaeda guerrilla network and their Taliban hosts in Afghanistan.
More than that, people are looking for spiritual guidance, soothsaying, current affairs, terrorism thrillers -- and some light relief.
``As soon as it happened, everybody wanted to know who the Taliban were,'' said Richard Fry, who works at one of Britain's biggest bookstores, Blackwells in Oxford.
``Anything about Afghanistan -- they want it,'' Fry said.
Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid's book ``Taliban - Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia'' has been reprinted three times since Sept. 11.
The book is on British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites)'s reading list as he helps build a global coalition against terror. Japanese diplomats pore over it and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer quotes from it knowledgeably.
It is riding at number three on U.S.-based online book retailer Amazon.com's best-seller list and at 24 on the British Amazon site. Another book on Afghanistan by Rashid is at number seven on Amazon.co.uk before it has even been published.
KORAN A HOT SELLER
Booksellers in Europe and the Middle East report an upsurge in interest in the Koran, Islam and international terrorism.
One book store in Rotterdam said sales of the Koran had increased by up to 80 percent.
With U.S. raids on Afghanistan portrayed as a clash between Islam and the West, despite statements to the contrary by Western leaders, sales of Bibles have taken off as well.
``Religion was not an issue before, but it has become one now,'' said Thomas Muellerof the German Bible Society.
German e-retailer BOL.COM reported a big upsurge in sales of books on Islam, a biography of bin Laden and ``Clash of Civilizations'' by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington.
The enigmatic predictions of the 16th century prophet Nostradamus were also moving briskly off the shelves.
``We'd normally not sell any of these, but they've all moved into the top 20 in the past month,'' BOL said.
The prophesies of Nostradamus are not the only port of call for those seeking to make sense of the world.
``Immediately after the events there was a great rush on anything by Nostradamus, then also Tom Clancy's 'Executive Orders','' said Jill van Zyl of South Africa's Exclusive Books.
Clancy's book is a political thriller in which a Japanese terrorist crashes a jumbo jet onto the Capitol, obliterating the president, Congress and the Supreme Court.
HOT OFF THE PRESSES
In Britain, sales of newspapers soared after the strikes. Biggest gainer was the left of center Guardian, which went up by 13 percent despite being attacked by more right-wing papers for not giving the government its wholehearted backing.
``There's fighting going on,'' said Sadhees, who works at Jal's Newsagents in central London. ``People want to know whether bin Laden has been caught yet.''
In Lebanon, where war is no novelty, newspapers sell out.
``Newspapers and news magazines are still selling very well because people want to know what America is doing.'' said the cashier at a busy Beirut branch of Librairie Antoine.
An Indian vendor in Kuwait said newspaper sales had doubled. ``Everybody is suddenly interested in reading and this is good money for us,'' he said.
Chinese publishers were busy meeting demand for information about terrorism not available in the state media.
``Papers, magazines and TV haven't done enough,'' said a spokesman for Beijing's Current Affairs Press.
But not everyone wants to read about global terrorism all the time.
In France, there was a surge in interest on the weekend after the attacks in books about New York and Islam, but Tuesday's bestseller list at online retailer Amazon.fr showed the French had returned to their pet topics – sex and politics.
Number one was the sex advice handbook ``203 ways to drive a man crazy in bed'' by Julie Saint-Ange.