Hi, I would like to get a bell ringer which makes as close to a decent phone ring as possible. Unfortunately, from what I've seen the actual bells in rotary style phones seem to be difficult to attach to projects without a lot of finessing, changing of voltage and current etc and material and are often a bit larger than I would prefer. Is there any type of phone style bell I could get which would be as simple as possible to hook up?
The old style phone bells were rung with something like 50V ac or thereabouts,
these days you would playback a sample through an audio amp and speaker.
The timbre of the bell will be directly related to its size and material. You can't really shrink them and have the sound of a big bell. Acoustics doesn't subscribe to Moore's Law. 
Much of the same applies to the mallet. It'll have to be large enough and hefty enough to "ding" instead of "ting", which means it'll take substantial force, and thus substantial current to move.
You can accomplish the same kind of thing with a H-bridge, I would imagine, without having to resort to AC. Nor would it necessarily need to be high voltage if you have a reasonable amount of current available. Might require re-winding the coils though.
In the UK its 75V AC RMS. With a 3 second cadence. (If that helps).
Once upon a time there where a number of sound effects records produced which contained recordings or simulations of lots of sounds. So maybe an MP3 triggered from the Arduino with the right sound effect loader?
Mark
What could be cooler than having a genuine rotary-style phone on your desk? And its ring would be perfect.
The folks at Spark Fun converted a rotary phone into a cell phone (which they used to sell as the Port-O-Rotary) . They describe the modifications in great detail here: https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/51
The high voltage ringer circuit is described here: High Voltage Ringer - SparkFun Electronics
A useful summary of old style phone ringer characteristics is here: Telephone Ring Voltage Tech Bulletin
This cheap little kit may be what you want Phone Sounds Generator | SG02MKT | Quasar Electronics Limited
Mark