A new article by Vanity Fair reveals an interesting tidbit about a '90s flirtation between the New York Times and Amazon.com. In a piece titled "The Inheritance," writer Mark Bowden chronicles NYT publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.'s efforts to keep the storied newspaper alive in today's rapidly changing media environment. Bowden talks to former Times CFO Diane Baker, who said she forged a major deal with Amazon.com, only to see it shot down.

Here's an excerpt:

Her biggest disappointment came when she crafted a potentially lucrative partnership with Amazon.com, already the biggest bookseller on the Internet. The Times would link all the titles reviewed in the paper’s prestigious Sunday Book Review section, ordinarily a money drain, to the online bookseller and receive a percentage on every book sold. “We could have made the Book Review into a big source of revenue,” she recalls. Baker knew that Amazon.com planned to eventually sell everything under the sun, to become the first digital supermarket. Not only would the deal have produced revenue from book sales, it would also have cemented a partnership with a tremendous future. She envisioned the newspaper as a virtual merchandising machine. Instead of the old carpet-bombing model of advertising, it would in effect target ads to readers of specific stories. “You know what they said?,” Baker recalls. “They said, We can’t do it, because Barnes & Noble is a big advertiser.”

It certainly would have made for an interesting linkup.

[Via GalleyCat]