Alphonse A. Éverat (1758?-1850) was a player of draughts and a composer of problems and end games. In 1811 he published an anthology of his compositions under the title "Manuel des amateurs du jeu de dames à la polonaise". The subtitle promised the reader that "the author has admitted nothing which can be found in earlier works".

In the 1839 issue of "Le Palamède", a chess journal that devoted space to draughts for economical reasons, he wrote on the history of his favourite game, quoting Herodotus. In his story on the Lydians -in ancient times Lydia was a mighty realm in the western part of Asia Minor- the Greek historian told that the Lydians, suffering under a famine, tried to forget their misery by inventing games and playing a board game with pieces [Kruijswijk 1966:35]. This board game was draughts, Éverat supposed.

Herodotus (statue in Naples)

According to Frédéric Alliey ["Biographie (...) sur le jeu de dames" 1852], Éverat held an important social position, being commissaire-général de la société philantropique in Paris, which means Éverat, a publisher, must have been well-off. On the Net I found some pages from a study, source unknown, on the printing office of Balzac, with 36 employees a medium-sized company; the author mentions figures of other printers by way of comparison: Firmin-Didot employed 200 men, Éverat about 500. In 1853, Paul Dupont wrote a "Chronologie de l'histoire de l'imprimerie" (Chronology of the history of printing). At an exposition in Paris in 1835 Mr. Everat, printer in Paris, successor to his father, received a golden medal (again in 1839) because of his illustrated books; he was one of the first printers editing illustrated books with woodcuts entered within the text. Dupont mentioned three examples: Paul et Virginie (written by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre), Corinne ou l'Italie (by Madame de Staël) et le Voyage en Perse (by Jean Foi Vaillant).

A hunt for the publishers of antiquarian French books from the 19th c. often yielded the name Éverat. There is no point to give an extended list here, I limit myself to some titles:

A play: La famille d'Anglade, ou le vol, melodrama by Fournier et Frédéric, de l'imprimerie d'Éverat, rue du Cadran, no. 16 ; 1817.

A novel: Claude Gueux by Victor Hugo (Everat 1834)

Two scientific works: Dictionnaire de législation usuelle, Contenant les notions du droit civil, commercial, criminel et administratif. Imprimerie et fonderie d’A. Éverat; Charles Beranger Religion Saint-Simonienne: Napoleon 1832?, Everat, imprimeur).