How to handle deletion delay

[David]

I'm dealing with deleting many duplicate editions of Hebrew books. Some users added books indiscriminately when the same edition already existed (no mandatory ISBN in Israel makes it easy) and these need to be split from the main version, delete-merged and then recombined, so the reviews for the deleted edition will go to the proper edition rather than the main one. Since the deletion is sometimes delayed for a long time, I write down the deleted URL and check back to do the recombine. On more than one occasion by that time the book was already recombined by someone else, maybe before the deletion occurred. In that case the reviews may have gone to the incorrect edition.
Is there a way to prevent that recombine from happening? Perhaps it is a good idea to leave a librarian note "deletion queued, please don't combine" on the book going for deletion?

[rivka, Former Moderator]

David wrote: "Perhaps it is a good idea to leave a librarian note "deletion queued, please don't combine" on the book going for deletion?"

That's fine.