POL is well known as a publishing house that encouraged poetry and authors like Charles Juliet and Edouard Levé, but it also has a reputation of best-selling house, gaining rewards and the success of works for a more or less wider audience, as those by Emmanuel Carrère or Martin Winckler. But the beginnings of its existence in the 1980s as an independent publishing house were difficult, and the archive now deposited at the IMEC allow a fresh assessment of this edifying period, between the publications of Georges Perec and Marguerite Duras. What do the documents convey? What have been the chances, the misfortunes, risks and concerns the POL publishing house faced in the 1980s? How did the publishers Emmanuel Hocquard and Bernard Noël attain solidity after having almost gone bankrupt? This article offers some tentative answers to these questions.