John Michell, a self-styled Merlin of the 1960s English counterculture who inspired disciples like the Rolling Stones with a deluge of writings about U.F.O.’s, prehistoric architecture and fairies  when he was not describing fascinating eccentrics or the perils of the metric system  died on April 24 in Poole, England. He was 76.

The cause was cancer, Jason Goodwin, his son, said.

Mr. Michell’s intellectual idiosyncrasies were paralleled by his deep and decidedly nonjudgmental fascination with the quirks of others.

His 1984 book, “Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions,” told of one man who devoted his life to proving the world was flat, and another to proving it was concave. He told of a couple who drilled holes in their own heads to feel better, then fought to have the government pay for the operation.

In other books he wrote about living frogs found inside lumps of coal and a talking ghost that insisted it was the spirit of a dead mongoose.