TEHRAN — Martyred leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei’s deep bond with books began in childhood and continued throughout his life, according to writer and former head of the Art Bureau Mohsen Momeni-Sharif, who has recalled a remarkable story from the leader’s youth: his painstaking collection and restoration of nearly 300 old books.
Momeni-Sharif, whose book The Secret of the Red Rose bears a written endorsement by the martyred Leader, said Ayatollah Khamenei’s intellectual and cultural dimensions were inseparable from his lifelong engagement with books, literature and the arts.
“When we speak about Ayatollah Martyr Seyyed Ali Khamenei, a collection of virtues comes before our eyes,” Momeni-Sharif said. 
“For some, the political dimensions of his personality may be more prominent. But for us in the fields of literature and art, his erudition, mastery and deep knowledge of culture — particularly literature and the arts — are of greater significance.”
Momeni-Sharif described the martyred Leader as an exceptionally learned figure, saying that his studies and intellectual interests extended across Islamic jurisprudence and principles, Qur’anic exegesis, the science of narrators, Islamic history, Arabic literature and Persian literature.
He said the foundation of Imam Khamenei’s love for books was laid in his family home. His father, who had only two rooms at his disposal, dedicated one of them to a library. His mother, meanwhile, was a cultivated woman with a deep interest in literature, poetry, hadith and the Qur’an.
It was in this environment, Momeni-Sharif said, that the martyred Leader developed a passion for reading from an early age.
As a young man in Mashhad, Ayatollah Khamenei was an avid reader who frequented prominent libraries, including the library of the Imam Reza shrine. He also sometimes borrowed or rented books from local booksellers.
But perhaps the most revealing account concerns what he did with books that others had discarded.
During his youth, some people would sell old and worn-out books to grocery shops, where their paper was reused for wrapping goods. Ayatollah Khamenei would seek out these books and purchase them from the shopkeepers, paying slightly more than their value as scrap paper.
He then learned to bind and restore them himself.
According to Momeni-Sharif, the martyred Leader eventually collected approximately 300 volumes in this manner. Some of those books, he said, remained in his library in later years.
The books had often lost their original covers and were in poor condition. Yet Ayatollah Khamenei, having learned the craft of bookbinding, would restore them at home using simple tools he had obtained for the purpose.
For Momeni-Sharif, the story is more than a personal anecdote. It reflects the depth of the martyred Leader’s attachment to books — an attachment formed in youth and carried into his later intellectual and public life.
His references to books in meetings and speeches, his written endorsements of literary works, and his regular meetings with writers and poets were, in this view, expressions of a concern with literature and Iranian-Islamic culture that had accompanied him since childhood.