IN THE MODERN pastime of thinking about Keanu Reeves, a few images endure: the monastic undercover F.B.I. agent in “Point Break,” the monastic prophesied savior of an oppressed future in “The Matrix,” the monastic emissary from an alien planet in “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Of these, “monastic art-book publisher” is perhaps less immediate, though, as of last year, it’s no less accurate. Since the summer, X Artists’ Books, a small press that Reeves launched in Los Angeles with the visual artist Alexandra Grant, has been producing aggressively esoteric titles of the kind that wouldn’t fly at larger imprints.

Not long after Grant and Reeves met at a dinner party in 2009, they began collaborating on their first book, for which the 45-year-old Grant — who makes text-based paintings about linguistic connections — created washed-ink drawings inspired by a winkingly morose poem that Reeves, 53, had written. The result, “Ode to Happiness,” released by the renowned German publisher Steidl, was an archly sullen self-care guide in the Sendakian mode, with a regimen that included “I hate myself face cream” and “alone again silk pajamas.” A few years later, they reunited with Steidl for “Shadows,” which paired Grant’s chromatic images of Reeves’s own silhouette with his gnomic meditation on loss, impermanence and acceptance. (It’s lighter than it sounds.)

Hollywood is lousy with actors’ vanity projects and left-field dalliances — burger joints and artisanal tequilas and cultish lifestyle companies that may or may not be pyramid schemes. But Reeves’s extracurriculars feel more in sync with his persona: They’re rooted in artless sincerity, whether he’s playing bass and supplying backing vocals for the mid-90s alt-rock band Dogstar or cofounding a California motorcycle manufacturer called Arch. Instead of feeling like a departure from acting, these projects — along with bookmaking — express a genuine interest in not just creating objects but in the process of creation itself. “Not that we’re reinventing anything,” Reeves says. “But the idea of a quality book is definitely our ambition.”