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I have no intention of doing either of those things myself as long as supermarkets and dry cleaners are around. But I might easily want a recipe for apple pie or a method for removing the blob of red wax from my dining room table (without removing the varnish too, as a household-hintless friend of mine did). Or I might just want to contemplate the vast, humbling but oddly comforting care, thrift and ingenuity that have been expended for centuries on the daily upkeep of life -- mostly by women, laboring for love, money or survival.

Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House By Cheryl Mendelson Scribner, 884 pages, Nonfiction   Also Today War of the dust-busters Cheryl Mendelson may have written "Home Comforts," but my grandmothers could out-scrub her any day. By Pamela Gordon

While bookstores abound in cookery classics -- the recently revised "Joy of Cooking," for example -- good household help is always hard to find. In fact, reading about housework can be much duller than doing it. I once, for example, had to copy-edit a book called "How to Remove Spots and Stains," an experience from which I developed a rule of my own: Dry-clean it or throw it out. At the other end of the comprehensiveness spectrum, Oxford University Press is shortly to reissue the 19th century English classic "Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management." But while I can't wait to browse this behemoth (the 1880 edition in Yale's library runs to 1,296 pages), I suspect that it won't offer much practical help with daily life in the 21st century.

The fact is, housekeeping has an image problem. It's essentially a backstage production, more noticeable in its lapses (the pink-tinged bathroom tile, the sticky kitchen floor) than in its successes (the measure of which, in my apartment, is getting up from the couch without looking as though you're modeling the latest trend in fur -- cat). Its equipment is low-tech -- brooms, mops, sponges -- and it lacks the glamour of related activities, like decorating and entertaining, that involve acquisition and display.

Because of a fusion of trends, most of them originating in California -- Alice Waters, sun-dried tomatoes, Williams-Sonoma -- the daily necessity known as cooking got repackaged in the 1980s as "cuisine." But despite Miele vacuum cleaners, Restoration Hardware and the hysterical home craft of Martha Stewart, actual housecleaning -- the unglamorous, interminable battle with dirt and disorder -- has never quite made it as a yuppie pastime. Just compare the sleek look and layout of décor magazines (Better Homes and Gardens, Metropolitan Home) or culinary magazines (Food & Wine, Saveur) with the print-heavy dowdiness of homemaking magazines (Good Housekeeping, the Ladies' Home Journal).

The one book of housekeeping hints I do own bears a revealing title: "The I Hate to Housekeep Book." How reassuring author Peg Bracken's humorous resistance must have seemed in 1962, at the end of the domesticity-mad 1950s: The housewife should not feel obliged to iron her husband's handkerchiefs, darn the family's socks, scrub their collars, polish the furniture. One heretical lady of her acquaintance even goes so far as not waxing her kitchen floor, although Bracken stops short of recommending such neglect. Bracken, in fact, didn't hate housework nearly as much as Betty Friedan, who just a year later (in "The Feminine Mystique") declared that it was driving women mad. Abandoning the Mop & Glo no longer seemed nearly revolutionary enough, and the market for homemaking hints has been slow ever since.

Now a sometime lawyer and philosophy professor and her editor at Scribner have gambled that the time has come for a housekeeping revival, purged of its association with the old-fashioned housewife. They appear to be on to something. Cheryl Mendelson's 800-page-plus "Home Comforts" has shipped 160,000 copies since November and held on as an amazon.com Hot 100 and a barnesandnoble.com Top 100 seller, as well as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection -- a breakout performance for a book whose 72 chapters include "Sanitizing the Laundry" and "Vacuuming, Sweeping, and Dusting."

Is "Home Comforts," as Katha Pollitt charged in the Jan. 24 issue of the Nation, an example of anti-feminist backlash designed to inspire guilt in women who regard housekeeping as a chore rather than, as Mendelson's subtitle has it, an "art" and a "science"? Is it, like the Miracle bra, a turn-of-the-century repackaging of midcentury femininity? Or, with its coverage of abstruse topics such as "Legal Protections Against Governmental Intrusions on Your Privacy"; its illustrated descriptions, addressed to the novice, of how to sew on a button, set a table and iron a shirt; and its determined gender neutrality (the book features housework but no housewives), is it a much-needed resource for the modern home?

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