Marie Kondo sparked a decluttering revolution, with numerous books on minimalism following in her tidy wake. Once readers have cleared out all their stuff, the next question is: how to keep those newly visible floors, counters, and bookshselves clean? Enter new books that repackage age-old chores for a modern readership.
Toni Hammersley, who blogs at A Bowl Full of Lemons (with 120,000 Pinterest followers), joins the battle against dust bunnies with The Complete Book of Clean (Weldon Owen, Apr.). Her first book, 2016’s The Complete Book of Home Organization, has sold more than 25,000 print copies, per NPD BookScan. Mariah Bear, associate publisher at Weldon Owen, says housekeeping was the obvious next step for the author.
“We wanted to do another book with Toni, but there wasn’t a book two on organizing,” Bear says. “Home cleaning goes along with organization.” In her new book, Hammersley offers DIY recipes for furniture polish, glass cleaner, and more using common household ingredients, and provides checklists for daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal chores.
Hammersley is among several lifestyle bloggers with sizeable social media followings who have books on housework pubbing this year. At the beginning of March, Avery released Melissa Maker’s Clean My Space, based on her 670,000-subscriber YouTube channel of the same name. In the book she elaborates on her three-step process for a clean home: identify the areas that most need attention; choose time-saving products, tools, and techniques that cut cleaning time in half; and schedule cleaning routines so that they stick.
In Simply Clean (Touchstone, Mar.), Becky Rapinchuk, who blogs at Clean Mama and who has 150,000 Pinterest followers, challenges readers to develop good habits by devoting 10 minutes a day to cleaning for 28 days. Her first book, The Organically Clean Home (Adams Media, 2014), has sold more than 18,000 print copies, per BookScan.
And it’s not just social media celebs who are trying to make cleaning more appealing. The venerable Fuller Brush Company, which has sold household products since 1906, is publishing three books in June in partnership with Publications International: Housekeeping, Bath & Kitchen, and Laundry. Though the brand is more than a century old, the books’ pastel-rustic aesthetic strikes a note the highly visual Instagram generation will recognize.
