Assouline Publishing will commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11 with the release of Art for Heart: Remember 9/11. The book features a collection of drawings created by young children shortly after the terrorist attacks.

All of the proceeds will be donated to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, a not-for-profit organization that operates the memorial and museum at Ground Zero. Museum director Alice M. Greenwald wrote the introduction and political journalist Christy Ferer wrote the forward.

Here’s more from the release: “In Art for Heart, the innocence so profoundly disrupted that day is nowhere better demonstrated than in the words and drawings created by children following the attacks. Straightforward and heartfelt, these works reveal the human instinct to bear witness, provide comfort, and attempt to make sense out of the unthinkable.”

In New York City, any library patron with $15 or more in fines can’t check out books. To ease this restriction, the New York Public Library and the Queens Public Library will allow 143,000 blocked kids a chance to “read down” their fines this summer.

Children who sign up on Summer Reading can take part in this program. Every fifteen minutes of reading reduces an overall fine by one dollar. The kids then record the titles and the time they spent reading on their Summer Reading 2011 account. The program kicked off on July 25th and will run until September 9th.

NYPL official Jack Martin told The NY Daily News: “Kids might be afraid or ashamed because they are delinquent with the library. The idea of this program is to bring them back in. We are in such hard economic times and children and teens depend on the library.” Do you think this is a fair trade-off? Would adults be open to “reading down” their fines too? (via BookTV)