HN search for "book about flies" turns up 8 threads as the top results. In addition to the current thread, these three, and one posted in a sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30683634

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15471621

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2494910

Naturally, those three threads have no discussion on them.

Yes, by convention we don't bother linking to past threads with no comments.

But what I meant by similar cases wasn't clear enough. I didn't mean other threads about this book about flies. I meant other mysterious cases of extreme outlier pricing—for other weird products. I'm pretty sure there have been a number of those over the years but my memory of what they were has eroded away.

Right, I figured that's probably what you meant. One thing that had moderate success for me was searching for "book about flies" in comments, since this story is more likely to get mentioned in stories that are related. (bemused thought: what would a PageRank-like algorithm turn up if it were driven by HN comments linking to other HN threads?)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13963743

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5448806

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3618114

Of course, this is a much noisier way to search, as it also picks up mentions of Lord of the Flies.

There's the original 2011 thread, Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475854

Yikes, not sure how I missed that. Added above—thanks!