Founder Alejo Cuervo named his bookshop in honour of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian poem considered to be the oldest surviving literary text. The shop is devoted to the wonderful world of fantasy and science fiction, with books as well as games, magazines, comics and figurines. The English section is also extensive, with a whole wall dedicated to paperbacks.
The bookshop was originally set up to support Cuervo’s publishing house of the same name. From its beginnings as a small publisher in the Eighties struggling to make ends meet, Gigamesh’s fortunes turned around when it won the contract to become the sole Spanish publisher of George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones (1996) and the rest of the fantasy novels from the A Song of Ice and Fire series. In an interview with El Mundo, Cuervo said drawing up the contract to print the series was “the best $5,000 spent in the history of the genre in Spain.”
