Filippo Bernardini, a former publishing employee who pleaded guilty in a fraud case in which the government accused him of stealing more than 1,000 manuscripts, avoided prison on Thursday but was ordered to be deported.

He was also ordered to pay $88,000 in restitution to the biggest name in publishing, Penguin Random House, to reimburse the company for legal and expert fees it paid as a result of the scheme.

For more than five years, Mr. Bernardini impersonated publishing professionals in the pursuit of unpublished manuscripts. He would pretend to be a specific editor, for example, and would email that person’s authors to ask for their latest drafts. The government said he impersonated hundreds of people.

His motivation was always mysterious. He was gathering information, but it was not clear how he might make money with it. Stolen manuscripts cannot be easily sold or published under another name.

In a letter this month to Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court in Manhattan, Mr. Bernardini said he had stolen the manuscripts because he wanted to read them.

“I never wanted to and I never leaked these manuscripts,” he wrote. “I wanted to keep them closely to my chest and be one of the fewest to cherish them before anyone else, before they ended up in bookshops. There were times where I read the manuscripts and I felt a special and unique connection with the author, almost like I was the editor of that book.”

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan had asked that Mr. Bernardini receive a prison term of at least one year for his extensive and long-running scheme.

“His impersonation and theft caused real reputational, emotional and financial harm to his victims,” the prosecutors wrote in a letter to Judge McMahon. “He continued in this criminal conduct for years, even as his victims confronted him, accusing him of theft and crimes, and even as his scheme attained public notice.”

Mr. Bernardini, 30, an Italian citizen who lived for many years in the United Kingdom, was sentenced to time served — he has been living under pretrial supervision in Manhattan since his arrest last year, with a curfew and an ankle bracelet monitoring his location. The court ordered him deported to the United Kingdom or to Italy.

Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting.

Beverly Gage, the author of “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century,” has been named the winner of the New-York Historical Society’s 2023 Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize, which is awarded annually for the best work of American history or biography.

The first major biography of Hoover written in three decades, “G-Man” draws on a wealth of previously unseen or uncensored documents, including many obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Over 837 pages, Gage, a professor at Yale University, takes a panoramic view of Hoover’s 48 years as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, looking not just at his infamous harassment campaigns against civil rights leaders in the 1960s but also his central role in the modernization of the bureau, which often won him the admiration of liberals.

Reviewing the book last year in The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai called it a “revelatory” portrait that shows Hoover “for who he really was — less an outsider to the so-called postwar consensus than an integral part of it.”

Gage’s book, published by Viking, was also a winner of this year’s Bancroft Prize, awarded by Columbia University and considered one of the most prestigious honors in the field of American history, as well as a bellwether of trends among academic historians.

The historical society’s prize, which will be awarded at a private event in April, rewards books that are accessible to a general audience. It often focuses on political history, and books that keep founders, presidents and other major figures, and their great deeds (or misdeeds), at the center of the story. Past winners of the prize, which comes with a cash award of $50,000, have included Alan Taylor, Jill Lepore, Jane Kamensky and Gordon S. Wood.

In a news release, Agnes Hsu-Tang, the chair of the historical society’s board of trustees, said that Gage “deftly illuminates one of the most complicated personalities in modern American history through descriptive gradations of light and shadow.”