The most elusive royal genealogical book ever published?

Royal Genealogies - A Legitimist's Handbook by Caroline Gordon-Duff, published in either January or February 2014. ISBN 10: 097530569 ISBN13: 978-097530561

From that information it should be easy to find out more about such a recent book (relatively speaking), to find out enough to decide whether or not it is worth buying, to then also decide what would be a fair price for the book, and to then find and buy a reasonably priced copy of the book, for whatever personal definition of 'reasonably priced' we may wish to apply. Right?

Wrong! There seems to be virtually nothing online about the book, which is crazy for a book published only 10 years ago, particularly one about royal genealogy, a subject that has loads of websites and a few forums online devoted to it and a community who lap up new books on the subject. Surely somebody at the time would have mentioned somewhere online that the book was about to come out, or had actually come out, or would have reviewed it after receiving it at the time. But there seems to be no such mentions of it anywhere online at all.

But let me rewind a moment. I first came to discover the existence of this book on Amazon a while ago, probably a few years ago, and read the Amazon description and the half dozen or so reviews with interest. This book apparently seeks to tell the stories of, and explain the genealogical descents of, more people with good claims to the British thrones than there have been actual British monarchs. The overwhelming positive reviews talk about 'hugely detailed family trees' and described the work as 'impeccably researched', which really whets my appetite for the book. A couple of the comments also give the odd minor constructive criticism, which means the ratings aren't 5/5 across the board, but 4.8/5 is still a high score and still makes this seem to be a 'must-have' book for royal genealogical enthusiasts like myself. So maybe I should bite the bullet and just buy it. But here's the crux of the matter... at the time of writing the cheapest copy of the book available is priced at £159.99, with a couple of further copies at just over £300. This is not for a multi-volume genealogical tome published a century or more ago and only sold at the time to libraries, which I could understand having a three figure asking price, due to age, size and relative rarity. This is for a 238 page book published a mere decade ago. My original assumption was that automatic pricing on Amazon, ebay or both had caused seller's of the book to inadvetently keep rising the price above each other, as can happen on either site if two different sellers both instruct the system to automatically set their price to a small percentage above the other seller, causing the system to keep alternately rising the price of each seller's copy, reaching crazy prices until one of the seller's notices and manual resets the price to something sensible. Since then I've been checking periodically on Amazon and the book hasn't become available below three figure sums at any time. So what gives? There isn't even a digital copy available to buy (or even one available unofficially elsewhere online). Was it such a limited run that the books are uber-rare and thus valuable. Did the publisher recall the book and only a handful had escaped into the wild? Does the book even exist at all. Almost all the evidence of its existence is on Amazon, and almost nothing anywhere else. In addition Amazon's facility to peek inside the book only allows us to see the front and back outside covers and nothing else, not a single inside page is available to see to get an idea of what the book is like, or to provide any meaningful proof of the book, so it's impossible to have any idea what, if anything, you would be getting for your £160.

I tried the British Library's catalogue on their website and came up with nothing, but that site was subject to a cyber attack some time ago and acknowledges that it's online catalogue does not contain everything that their full catalogue would. I tried searching for any copy available elsewhere online, on ebay, via various book shops and so on, and found literally nothing except the copies available on Amazon. I tried to track down the publishers 'Bank House Books', but the url that may have originally belonged to that publisher seems to now have some sort of 'lifestyle' blog about different types of learning on it. Another website appeared to suggest that Bank House Books published their last book in 2010, but the book I'm trying to find was supposedly published by them in 2014, according to Amazon, so something doesn't add up there. I also searched in The Times Digital Archive for any mention of the author, or her book, and couldn't find anything there, though surely they would have had an interest in reviewing royal genealogical books and would have at least mentioned her book in passing?

I then tried to use my genealogical research skills to track down information about the author, who appears to have never published anything else other than this book, which seems odd in and of itself. It turns out there are two women with the name 'Caroline Gordon-Duff', whose husbands turn out to have been brothers, and it could be either one that is the author of this book. One of the women, with a middle initial 'O', passed away in Scotland in 2019, whilst the other, with middle initials 'E M' looks to be still alive and, from looking on the public electoral roll from 2002 and cross-referencing it against land registry data, seems likely to still be living on a farm in the OX3 area, so maybe I should be either paying a visit (though the address is a little over 30 miles away from me, and I don't drive, and don't really want to doorstep the author of one long lost book, or have a wasted journey if it turns out she no longer lives there) or writing her a letter. I may yet write such a letter, but I'm reluctant in case the book doesn't exist and is all an elaborate hoax that has duped Amazon into making a listing for it to allow false sales listings to then trick curious people out of money. In the fairly unlikely event the whole thing is a hoax, then I'd either find myself writing to the hoaxer themselves (or possible the sister-in-law of the late hoaxer) and sending my personal details, which wouldn't be a great outcome, or far more likely I'd find myself writing to a completely unconnected and bemused individual whose aristocratic sounding name was randomly chosen as a convincing author's name for a book about royal genealogies.

At this point I'm pretty well out of ideas, so it you are reading this and can think of any other possible places online, or elsewhere, that might yield more information about this book then please get in touch. I'd also be interested to here from anybody whose actually read or even merely seen this book somewhere. There must be something else out there beyond the Amazon listing....