Benjamin Wilson was not a professional scholar. He was a newspaper editor in Geneva, Illinois, who taught himself Greek, and between 1857 and 1863 he issued, a section at a time, an interlinear New Testament that he had not only translated but manufactured: his nephew watched him take wax impressions of each page of type, hang them in acid overnight to grow a skin of copper, back the copper with cast metal, and print the result on a hand press while the boy inked the plate. The finished volume appeared in 1864. For his Greek he used the text Johann Jakob Griesbach had established in the 1770s, with readings drawn from Codex Vaticanus.
What Wilson actually printed was two English texts, not one. Down the left of the page ran the Greek with a literal word-for-word English gloss beneath each word; down the right ran his own polished translation, the Emphatic Version. They are not the same, and at John 1:1 they disagree outright — the gloss reads “and a god was the Word”, the Emphatic Version “and the LOGOS was God”. Both are Wilson's, printed in the same book, three inches apart. This corpus holds the gloss, which is the column people quote, and that is the reason it sits in a section of its own rather than in the grid of Bibles. A gloss records how a Greek sentence is put together — case by case, article by article, in Greek word order. It is not a judgement about how the sentence should be read in English, and Wilson's own judgement about that is printed in the next column. Anyone citing the one should know the other exists.
The book's later life is the reason most people have heard of it. Wilson died in 1900 a member of the Church of the Blessed Hope, not of any group that then existed under the name Jehovah's Witnesses. In 1902 Charles Taze Russell, president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, obtained the copyright from Wilson's heirs and in time the plates as well. The Society printed the Diaglott for the next sixty years — resetting the type on its own presses in 1927, running off well over a hundred and fifty thousand copies, selling it for two dollars and eventually giving it away. So the Diaglott is a Jehovah's Witness book by adoption rather than by authorship, and its habit of printing “Jehovah” in the New Testament, where the writers wrote κύριος while quoting the Hebrew scriptures, arrived four decades before the movement that made the practice famous. The copyright lapsed in 1952 and it has been public domain since.
Two things about it in this reader are worth knowing before you use it. Griesbach did not print Acts 8:37 or Luke 17:36, so neither is here; rather than close the gap and shift every later verse up by one, the numbering leaves the two places empty, so a reference still lands on the same verse in this column as in the one beside it. And because no antecedent is recorded for it, opening a lineage rung beneath a Diaglott verse goes straight to the original-language floor marked with ≈ rather than to an older English edition — which, for a text whose whole purpose is to show you the Greek, is arguably where it should go anyway.