Murray Ritchie toasts a paper making the news itself.

For a tiny newspaper it began life with an impressively grand masthead - the Eskdale and Liddesdale Advertiser and Monthly Journal. Tomorrow the first penny newspaper in Scotland is 150 years old and is better known simply and with affection as the Langholm paper, or the E & L. The great and the good will gather in the Muckle Toun in Dumfriesshire to celebrate with ''drink, dialogue, food, and festivities''.

When it was first printed in 1848 the Langholm paper was taken by readers who could remember Robert Burns. It was the forerunner of today's free-sheet - long on advertising but short on news - and boasted of being ''circulated gratuitously in the towns of Langholm, Hawick, Annan, Lockerbie, and Ecclefechan, and sent to almost every family in the parishes of Langholm and Canonbie, Castleton, Ewes, Westerkirk, Eskdalemuir, Half-Morton, and Middlebie''.

The Langholm paper is living proof that small is beautiful even in today's frenzied media world where, amazingly, it continues to hold its place. Its circulation might still be minuscule but it sells - for 28p nowadays - to almost every household in the area, a tribute to its remarkable popularity.

Thomas Rome founded the E & L as an advertising medium. He put news in later which meant his brother, Robert, who ran it until 1876, had to hire an editor, William Jackson. Around that time a cover price of 1d was introduced, a revolutionary move which gave the Langholm paper its place in the history of Scottish journalism. A bookseller and stationer, Walter Wilson, took over and sold it a year before his death in 1918 to Andrew Little. He died in 1939 when his widow, Fanny, took over, earning the distinction for a while as Britain's only woman newspaper proprietor.

Fanny's younger son, Bowman, ran the E & L for more than 30 years, 20 as owner, and became a Langholm legend. He and his brother, Alan, who took over later, must have been the last editors in Scotland to cover every spectrum of print journalism.

Bowman went out to report the stories (with no shorthand but a series of secret personal codes and squiggles, which triggered a remarkable memory). He came back to his tiny office, in the back of his paper shop, where he put the stories into hot metal and turned pictures into metal blocks. Then he banged the metal into place in page frames, which he placed on an ancient, clattering Wharfdale flatbed press. Next he ran off the required number of copies, normally a single sheet, folded. When that was done he loaded his car and delivered them person-ally to agents, distributors, and readers - before starting the process again for the next week.

Bowman was not exactly built like an athlete but no-one could match his speed at getting downstairs from his editorial eyrie to his print shop. He had installed an almost perpendicular wooden ladder which he slid down with startling agility when a story beckoned.

He was the archetypal local newspaperman. His wife, Gladys, remarked once that Bowman knew so many people in Langholm that the five-minute walk down the High Street took him 45 minutes, most of which were spent picking up stories.

Langholm's most famous son, the poet, Hugh MacDiarmid (C M Grieve) was among readers who sent centenary messages of congratulations in 1948. ''Chaos may descend on the world at large. All the more important, then, that the Langholm paper should continue to tether our minds and hearts to the elementary loyalties of decent human beings. There is nothing more universal than the local,'' he wrote.

Bowman's death at 52 brought the E & L its greatest crisis. It was put on the market amid fears that some media group or tycoon would snap it up, strip its assets, and close it after it had been in the Little family for almost 75 years. But Bowman's brother, Alan, returned from East Africa and the Middle East, where he had worked in journalism and printing. He took over before his untimely death in 1986. Alan's widow, Betty, and daughter Alison Aston, ran the business until 1992.

Later that year the E & L was run off for the last time from its back shop in Langholm's High Street.

The flatbed had to be scrapped. Some of the machinery went to a museum and some sold to be replaced by a boring computer. The atmosphere of that old shop, redolent of printer's ink, a million cigarettes, and a vanished craft, is now a memory, but the good news is that the Eskdale and Liddesdale Advertiser is now thriving.

It is bigger, carries more news and pictures, and sells as well as ever, employing more people - including Alison as a director and Betty as a contributor - and is now printed by its new owners, Joy and Herbert Chatters, in Penrith.

Newspaper people everywhere will wish it a happy birthday.